CHANGE AGENTS:
WHO LEADS AND WHY IN THE EXECUTION OF US NATIONAL SECURITY
POLICY
By
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE
OF TECHNO LOGY
Kathleen H. Hicks
MPA, National Security Studies
University of Maryland, 1993
AB, History and Politics
Mount Holyoke College, 1991
JUN 2 9 2010
LIBRAR IES
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE (COURSE 17)
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTORATE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
February 2010
4 "eC-
ARCHNVES
-V
@2010 Kathleen H. Hicks. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce
and to distribute publicly paper and electronic
copies of this thesis document in whole or in part
in any medium now known or hereafter created.
Signature of Author:
Department of Political Science
October 19, 2009
Certified bv:
Charles Stewart
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by:
Roger Petersen, Associate Professor of Political Science
Chairman, Graduate Program Committee
CHANGE AGENTS:
WHO LEADS AND WHY IN THE EXECUTION OF US NATIONAL SECURITY
POLICY
Kathleen H. Hicks
Submitted to the Department of Political Science (Course 17)
In February 2010 in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of Doctorate in Political Science
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the factors affecting national security mission
assignment decisions. It focuses on cases in which military or civilian agents are
selected in lieu of the other. Six factors are identified for testing as possible
contributors to agency selection. These factors are drawn from the existing
academic literature in the fields of civil-military relations, presidential and
congressional politics, and public administration and bureaucratic decisionmaking. After isolating a post-World War 11data set of American national security
mission assignments, the author examines eight cases that roughly divide
between military agent choice and civilian agent choice. The military cases are:
the governance of defeated Germany, the 1961 transfer of civil defense
responsibility to the Department of Defense, aerial and maritime detection and
monitoring in the war on drugs, and support to domestic chemical, biological,
radiological, and nuclear consequence management missions. Cases of civilian
agent choice include the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, the creation of civilian civil defense agencies following World War
II, the training of foreign police, and the transfer to FEMA of civil defense
responsibilities once managed by DoD.
From the evidence in these cases, the author concludes that the degree to
which civilian decision-makers are seized with the importance of a national
security mission and the implications they ascribe to military or civilian
institutionalization of that role are paramount considerations in determining how
agencies are selected to lead in new threat areas. Moreover, the geopolitical
implications of agent selection are themselves calculated according to an
agency's effectiveness-or, alternatively, foreign and domestic public
perceptions of its effectiveness. This assessment of effectiveness is critical in
determining what strategic signal is being sent by its assignment to a new
mission. The findings in this analysis appear to be consistent with David
Mayhew's theory that political leaders often seek symbolic value for their policy
choices.
Thesis Supervisor: Charles Stewart
Title: Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
CONTENTS
...............
ACK NO W LEDG EM ENTS .....................
....................................... 4
1. WHO LEADS AND WHY? ..........................................................................
2. STATE O F TH E FIELD ................................................
5
12
.......................
Civil-M ilitary Relations ...................................................................................
. . 12
17
The President and National Security ..........................................................
. 19
Congressional Politics ....................................................................................
Bureaucratic and Interest Politics ....................................................................
22
3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY.............
...........................
31
Inferring Theories of Mission Assignment.......................................................
31
Case Unive rse ..............................................................................................
. . 34
4. SELECTED CASES OF AGENT CHOICE................................................
42
Choosing Military Agents...............................................................................
42
Cho osing Civilia ns ...........................................
... ........................................... 74
5. SHIFTING AGENTS: THE HISTORY OF CIVIL DEFENSE...................... 96
Civil Defense in the Cold W ar.........................................................................
Phase I: Civilian Leadership (1948-1962).......................
Phase 11: Military Leadership (1962-1979).....................
96
. ...................... 98
. ......................... 107
Phase III: Civilian Leadership...Again (1979-present)..................................... 114
6. RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS AND PREDICTIONS....................................
Strategic Environment
...................................
119
122
Nature of A merican S ociety ..............................................................................
127
Ele cto ral Valu e .................................................................................................
13 0
Agency Design and Budgetary Consequences ................................................
134
Inter- and Intra-agency Politics .........................................................................
137
CONCL USIO N .................................................................................................
14 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation was conceived in 2000 and completed nine years later.
Inthe interim, the maturation of a new "Global War on Terror" drove professional
demands to dominate academic pursuits, and the happy demands of raising a
family likewise intervened. I am deeply indebted to my husband, Thomas Hicks,
without whose love and support-and willingness to relocate home and hearth
for two years-I could not have pursued my MIT studies and completed this
dissertation. I am also grateful for the patience and guidance of my MIT thesis
committee, Dr. Charles Stewart, Dr. Harvey Sapolsky, and Dr. Cindy Williams.
The unwavering confidence each of these scholars expressed in my ability to
overcome the many obstacles to completing this dissertation made the difference
between success and abandonment. I also thank the Office of the Secretary of
Defense Graduate Fellowship Program for underwriting my coursework. Finally,
I am grateful to my parents for instilling in me a curiosity about the world of ideas,
a code of academic excellence, and a dedication to public service.
dissertation reflects my earnest attempt to meet these standards.
This
1. WHO LEADS AND WHY?
In the wake of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, Congress focused on ways to improve police and firefighter
response to domestic emergencies.
Senators Nunn, Lugar, and Domenici
spearheaded legislation that charged the Department of Defense (DoD) with the
mission to train US emergency personnel in managing the consequences of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) events.' Far from lobbying for the program,
DoD was uninterested in the new mission and hired contractors to administer it.
DoD ultimately divested itself of the program entirely, reaching an agreement
with the Attorney General several years later to transfer the training program to
the Department of Justice's Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP).
Under
ODP, the program expanded into a national Domestic Preparedness Program,
building on the Department of Justice's strong links with local law enforcement
and first responder communities.
More than thirty-five years earlier, on the heels of the Soviet launch of
Sputnik and its more ominous follow-on rocket, Sputnik 2, President Eisenhower
oversaw the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA).
NASA's birth as a civilian agency was hardly predestined.
The
Department of Defense had numerous space-related programs underway,
particularly in the areas of reconnaissance and rocketry. Elements within the
1Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, U.S. Code, vol. 50, sec. 2302(1) (1996).
This provision is commonly referred to as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness
program.
Army and Air Force and the Advanced Research Projects Agency were in favor
of organizing the national space effort under military leadership, as had occurred
in the Manhattan Project. With the support of Senator Lyndon Johnson, the most
powerful voice in the US Congress on space-related matters, Eisenhower's
preference for a civilian agency ultimately prevailed.
These brief, seemingly unrelated, vignettes help illustrate a simple truth:
US political leaders sometimes choose civilian solutions to emerging problems
and sometimes military solutions. In either case, the cause for selection is not
always evident. When there is no viable alternative agent in the civilian sector,
the rationale for calling upon the military in times of crisis may merely be one of
expediency and capacity. This appears to be the case in Afghanistan and Iraq,
where the US military has borne the majority of the responsibility for stabilization
and reconstruction due to limited civilian capacity and the contested security
environment in these countries. Even when viable alternatives seem to exist,
however, there are instances in which political leaders have still assigned the
mission to the US military.
Responsibilities relating to domestic firefighting,
counternarcotics, and global health surveillance are several examples of this
seemingly curious mission assignment.
As the creation of NASA demonstrates, agent selection at times favors
civilian actors. This can happen despite the existence of substantial military
experience or know-how. The creation of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign police training are all
instances of civilian agent selection over military alternatives. America's tradition
of civilian control of the military can act as a significant check on military "mission
creep," but the conditions under which American political leaders raise and lower
this barrier are little discussed.
Understanding those motivations and their
underlying conditions could provide the political scientist with predictive power to
identify likely national security agents.
For scholars of civil-military relations, the issue can be focused even more
narrowly: what motivates the American public and its elected officials to turn to
the military, or away from it, to manage perceived new threats? Although there
has been considerable scholarly debate over the advisability of expanding the
military's role beyond traditional warfighting, there has been virtually no effort to
understand why the military is sometimes decision-makers' first choice for these
missions.
Furthermore, modern civil-military literature seems to accept the
phenomenon of preferred military agency, whatever its causes, as universal. As
the NASA case and its more modern parallels make clear, however, the military
is not always the preferred choice.
For many pundits, setting aside the normative issue of the appropriate role
of the military and instead assessing whether one can generalize about why
mission assignment may at times preference military or civilian agents may be
asking the far less interesting of the two questions. For the social scientist,
however, understanding the agent selection phenomenon is critical. It provides
insight into how the President, Congress, and elites view the US military relative
to other agents of government, with broad implications for national and homeland
security.
It also unveils the possible political, strategic, societal, and
organizational dynamics that sway decision-makers to choose the military or its
civilian counterparts.
In both of these ways, understanding national security
agent selection could fill a notable void in the civil-military literature.
The following two-by-two tables represent, in greatly simplified terms, the
strategic interaction creating national security mission assignment.
Figure 1
illustrates the military agency selection decision space:
Figure 1
US Military
No Assignment
Assignment Demand
Demand
- When political leaders and military circles overwhelming support a military
agent (upper left), the mission is assigned to the military.
Conversely, when there is no demand on the part of either the military or
-
elected officials for assigning a task to DoD (lower right), other agents are
given the responsibility.
In these two quadrants, military supply and civilian demand are reconciled to the
satisfaction of both sides.
- Absent a fundamental breach in civilian control of the military, there should be
no cases in which the US military is undertaking a mission without approval of
the elected government. The subordination of the military to civilian authority
should thus create a null set in the lower left quadrant.
In the upper right quadrant, civilian decision makers impose a mission on a
-
reluctant military.
Figure 2 illustrates the same problem set from the civilian agency
perspective.
Figure 2
US Civilian Agency
No Assignment
Assignment Demand
Demand
Win
Win
c
Civilian Agency
Assigned Mission
.
.j
Civilian Agency
Assigned Mission
Win
Win
Win
Win
Cn
8-
ci
.o
C
2
Civilian Agency
Assumes Mission
(Limited)
Win
Mission Not Assigned
to Agency
Win
A modest difference between Figures 1 and 2 is found in the lower left quadrant.
Whereas civilian control of the military should produce a null set in Figure 1,
Figure 2 is more likely to generate a few cases where civilian agencies are willing
and authorized to spend resources to execute missions of little interest to elected
officials. In addition to being few in number, these cases are also likely to be
transient, as an agency would be unlikely to sustain a mission without financial
relief from the White House and/or Capitol Hill.
These two-by-two matrices are illustrative. Few cases are likely to fall
neatly into one of their boxes, as individuals or components within the political
decision-maker, civilian agency, and military actor sets may lobby for a minority
view on mission assignment.
This dissertation seeks to examine the factors affecting national security
mission assignment decisions. It focuses on cases in which military or civilian
agents are selected in lieu of the other. Chapter 2 provides possible clues and
theories on agent selection drawn from existing political science and public
administration literature. Chapter 3 then isolates six factors that this literature
suggests as possible causes of national security agent selection. It also
describes the research design and resulting dataset of instances over the past
fifty-five years in which the nation's political leaders appear to have made a
conscious choice for military leadership, civilian leadership, or a division of labor
between them in the national security realm.
Chapters 4 and 5 present case data for exploration of possible
explanations to mission assignment choice. Chapter 4 process traces in detail
three cases of military agency choice and two cases of civilian choice since the
end of World War II, delineating the bureaucratic, societal, and geostrategic
circumstances surrounding these choices. Chapter 5 provides three additional
cases of agent selection occurring in a single mission area: US civil defense
policy, which has passed from civilian to military hands and then back again over
the course of thirty years. As with the short cases presented in Chapter 4, the
author probes the various stages of civil defense agent selection for potential
explanations.
Chapter 6 sifts through the evidence presented in the eight cases to
determine which theories have the greatest explanatory power. The dissertation
concludes with some areas for further research and thoughts on the implications
of the findings for US national security policy.
2. STATE OF THE FIELD
Numerous strains of social science literature bear on the issue of agent
selection and mission assignment. Existing works on civil-military relations and
the history of American political development shed light on how civilian elites and
the public view the standing US military and its roles relative to civilian agents.
Presidential and national security scholarship relies on personal attributes of the
president and agency leaders to explain decision-making in the Executive
Branch. Congressional scholarship provides theories to explain members' voting
motivations. Closely linked is the theory of the iron triangle, wherein interest
politics come to dominate resource distribution in the US Government. Graham
Allison's bureaucratic politics model provides possible insights into how
competing interests within the government might contribute to policy decisions,
and the public administration literature points to agencies' incentives to selfperpetuate. Each of these areas is addressed in turn below.
Civil-Military Relations
The civil-military relations literature can be roughly divided into two
categories. One examines the military as a profession-its core principles and
collective identity.
The second looks at how the world's militaries are
incorporated into governance structures, with much of the empirical research on
developing countries and emerging democracies. The two strains of work are of
course related, as a critical aspect of military professionalism is the distancing of
military officers from political matters. Further, both are focused on assessing
and ensuring adequate civilian control over the military. Summarized below are
three important representatives of civil-military relations literature:
Morris
Janowitz's The Professional Soldier, Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the
State, and Stanislav Andreski's Military Organization and Society.
Morris Janowitz's 1964 work, The Professional Soldier, is concerned with
the changing nature of the military profession in the Cold War era. Janowitz's
central argument is that attempts to make the military ethos more reflective of
society need to be balanced against civilian respect for the unique contributions
of the military mindset. "Recognition of the specialized attributes of the military
profession," Janowitz states, "will provide a realistic basis for maintaining civilian
political supremacy without destroying required professional autonomy." 2 One of
Janowitz's primary concerns is the changing political behavior of the military amid
the burgeoning Cold War infrastructure designed to control it. He attributes the
politicization of the military to its need to respond to the differing requirements of
the executive branch, in which control is highly centralized, and the legislative
branch, in which control is diffuse. With the former, the military has to worry
about maintaining the executive's attention in the face of competing bureaucratic
interests; with the latter, the military has to remain ever ready to respond to
congressional inquiry.
Relevant to this study, then, is Janowitz's conclusion on how the military
copes with these realities. "The professional soldier thrives in this setting only if
2 Morris
Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 16.
he has the strongest positive commitments to the system of civilian control,"
Janowitz comments.
"Fundamentally, this means that civilian supremacy is
effective because the professional soldier believes that his political superiors are
dedicated men who are prepared to weigh his professional advice with great
care." 3 Military professionalism therefore depends on civilian appreciation of the
military's unique role and perspective.
Samuel Huntington's classic The Soldier and the State, penned seven
years before Janowitz's work, addresses the question of how the military
profession can best be protected from internal and external forces of
disintegration.
Huntington notes that the liberalism of America's forefathers
prompted them to forego a standing army and that this position was widely
supported in the United States until after World War II. The history of the early
twentieth century and the omnipresent threat of the Cold War, Huntington
argues, forced a reexamination of traditional liberalism, particularly its rejection of
the standing army. The ultimate result, according to Huntington, was a shift from
liberalism to a "new conservatism" that balanced civilian control with improved
military readiness.
New conservatism could take hold because the American
public generally saw the military as apolitical and firmly rooted in democratic
principles. To Huntington, this common appreciation of military professionals
was crucial to the continuation of new conservatism. "Ifthey [the military] abjure
the military spirit, they destroy themselves first and their nation ultimately,"
Huntington warned. "Ifthe civilians permit the soldiers to adhere to the military
3
Ibid., 367.
standard, the nations themselves may eventually find redemption and security in
making that standard their own." 4
In The Soldier and the State, Huntington identifies two approaches to
subjective civilian control of the military within the United States.5
The first,
extirpation, involves the elimination of the military from liberal American society.
The second, transmutation, occurs when liberal society is forced to accept an
armed force in its midst, as it has since the end of World War II. Transmutation
is a form of subjective military control that attempts to refashion the military along
liberal lines in order to cope with the paradox of a standing military in a liberal
society. Among its manifestations are heightened civilian interest in the militia
and universal service, a loosening of the hierarchical nature of the military
institution, and the use of the military for "socially desirable objectives."6
It is this latter manifestation that ties the theory of transmutation to the
process of mission assignment. Huntington states that the use of the military for
non-warfighting missions "has been a persistent element throughout American
history from the beginning of the public works activities of the Corps of Engineers
down to the present time. It contrasts with the . . . view that the only purpose for
military forces is war."7 Because transmutation's goal is "the subordination of
functional military imperatives and the professional military viewpoint," it offers
4 Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1957), 466.
5 Ibid., 155-156.
6 Ibid.,
7 Ibid.
157.
one explanation for why civilian elites might assign missions in the face of
opposition from the military establishment.8
Civilian demands on the military are at the center of Stanislav Andreski's
Military Organization and Society. Andreski was the first of the post-World War 11
authors to write on the armed forces and society. He argued that society is
pyramidically shaped, with a small number of elites at the top and the mass of
society at the bottom. He then hypothesized that the few at the top would seek
to control the military in order to retain their position of power. Andreski's main
contention is that the more reliant a military is on manpower from the masses,
the less successful elites will be in abusing their power. Andreski's work is
directed at newly emerging states and the ends to which a powerful but small
elite can put an impressionable and pre-professional military.
It is thus not
directly applicable to the modern US experience, and few scholars have pursued
Andreski's interest in how civilians might manipulate the military for their own
purposes.9
The gap in the civil-military relations literature is therefore significant for
those wishing to understand mission-assignment decisions.
There is little
theoretic or empiric work on how it is that, in liberal democracies, civilians have
assigned seemingly non-military roles to the military. Even post-Cold War writing
on civil-military relations ignores the issue of why civilians have turned to the
8
Ibid., 155.
9 This summary of Andreski draws from Martin Edmonds, Armed Services and Society (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1990), 71-73
military for nontraditional missions. Instead, the topics of debate are, first, how to
evolve the military profession in light of the increasing number of "political"
missions the armed forces are assigned and, second, whether it is appropriate
for the military to carry out these missions.10
This gap in the literature may be due to authors' focus on military
professionalism to the exclusion of civilian professionalism and effectiveness.
Moreover, whether civilian academics or retired military officers, those who write
on the subject largely assume that the role of political leadership is one of
negative control-constraining military power and budgets-rather than additive,
positive control."
As the above summary of the civil-military relations literature
demonstrates, the irony is that the continued professionalization of the military
depends not only on its role as an apolitical agent of the state, but equally on
political authorities' appreciation of that unique role.
The President and National Security
"The President stands at the center of the foreign policy process in the
United States," states Morton Halperin and Priscilla Clapp in Bureaucratic Politics
and Foreign Policy. "His role in and influence on decisionmaking are qualitatively
10 See, for example, Rudolph C. Barnes, Jr., Military Legitimacy: Might and Right in the New
Millennium (London: Frank Cass, 1996) and Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Digest of
Findings and Studies, Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Project on the Gap Between the
Military and Civilian Society, presented at "The Conference on the Military and Civilian Society,
28-29 October 1999.
1 A notable exception to this assertion is the subset of civil-military literature that examines
civilians' use of the military for "social experimentation."
different from those of any other participant."1 2 Presidential scholar Michael
Nelson agrees:
Presidents are held accountable, fairly or unfairly, for the functioning of the
entire government, particularly when it comes to national security. It is a
lot easier for voters to assign credit or blame to their member of
Congress.... It should come as no surprise that presidents seek power
commensurate with their accountability. 3
When it comes to national security, then, the president's role and motivations
should be central to understanding why one agent is selected over another.
The foundation of almost all scholarship on US presidential power is the
work of Richard Nuestadt. Drawing on forty years of case studies, Neustadt
argued that a chief executive's power is derived from three main sources. First,
the president has an inherent positional advantage that in many circumstances
allows him to dictate his preferred solution to subordinates.
Second, others'
calculations that the president is willing and able to use his power to achieve his
preferred solution affect his success.
Third, the view by these same
stakeholders, be they in Congress or the Executive Branch, that the president
has public support for his solution is critical. A president's choices "are his
means to conserve and tap the sources of his power."
Neustadt cautions,
however, that "alternatively, choices are the means by which he dissipates his
power."04
Morton H. Halperin and Priscilla A. Clapp, with Arnold Kanter, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign
Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 16.
13 Michael Nelson, The Presidency and the Political System (Washington: CQ Press, 2006), 423.
12
1
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of
Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 150.
Neustadt's work is largely prescriptive, advising on how presidents should
hold and increase their somewhat precarious power.15
Neither he nor
subsequent presidential scholars attempt to assess in depth why presidents
choose certain courses of action in peacetime beyond the scholarship on
bureaucratic decision-making delineated below.
Moreover, the subfield of
presidential national security decision-making is dominated by an assessment of
international and domestic factors affecting a decision to intervene with forces
overseas. To date, the field has not paid significant attention to the rationale for
president's decisions to use the military over civilian agents, or vice versa, during
times of peace or war.
Congressional Politics
Presidential scholars agree that Congress's role in national security policy
has been on the increase since the end of the Cold War.' 6 The dynamics behind
congressional decision-making are highly relevant to the question of national
security mission assignment.
In his classic work, Congress: The Electoral
Connection, David Mayhew contends that virtually all members of Congress
focus on reelection as a proximate goal. He identifies three main types of activity
that election-conscious members engage in: advertising, credit claiming, and
1Although most social scientists view Neustadt's work as unscientific, at least one presidential
scholar believes Neustadt's work contributes to a generalizable theory of accreting institutional
power inthe office of the president. See Matthew J. Dickson, "Neustadt, New Institutionalism,
and Presidential Decision Making: ATheory and Test," Presidential Studies Quarterly 35 (June
2005): 259-289.
16 For example, see Halperin and Clapp, 314 and Neustadt, 317.
position taking. Members advertise in order to create name recognition and a
positive public image, using such media as newsletters, personal appearances,
and letters and phone calls to constituents. Credit claiming is undertaken in
order to demonstrate that the member is personally responsible for governmental
action on a particular issue. Credit claiming is commonly achieved through the
trafficking in particularized benefits, such as attending to constituent requests
and complaints or providing "pork" to the home district. Further, benefits may be
directed toward particular groups other than the home district, such as according
to class, ethnicity, profession, issue area or other subgroup.
As Mayhew
explains, "campaign contributions flow into districts from the outside, so it would
not be surprising to find that benefits go where the resources are."1 7
Because claiming credit credibly is difficult beyond such particularized
allocations-witness the guffaws over "I invented the Internet" and other attempts
to take individual responsibility for government policy-legislative actions that do
not deal in such distributive politics are usually driven by position taking. By
staking out positions and articulating them to constituents, the member is directly
influencing his electoral hopes. Moreover, it is not policy success that is helpful
to the individual member but the record of expressed political judgment, such as
through roll call votes, floors addresses, speeches, and press releases. "The
electoral requirement is not that [the member] make pleasing things happen,"
David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1974), 57.
1
notes Mayhew, "but that he make pleasing judgmental statements. The position
itself is the political commodity."18
According to Mayhew, these electoral incentives have consequences for
Congress's three major functions: expressing public opinion, wherein Congress
"emerges as a cacophonous chorus"; handling constituent requests, prompting
the quick supply of particularized benefits; and legislating and overseeing
administration.
It is this last category, concerned with policy making, which
relates to the mission assignment process most directly. In making policy and
designating agents, members are motivated by the desires to claim credit and
take positions. Mayhew argues that there are four distinct consequences for
legislation. First, it is often marked by delay because members lack interest in
mobilizing support for any particular policy outcome.
Second, legislation is
particularistic wherever possible so that members can credibly claim credit with
an important constituency. Third and related, legislation often caters to mobilized
interest groups, particularly those "nationally organized groups with enough widespread local clout to inspire favorable roll call positions on selected issues among
a majority of members" or that are well endowed. 19 Fourth, legislative effect is
secondary to symbolic value.
Congressional concern with administrative
feasibility is quite muted, except where it affects important constituencies or
committee jurisdictions.2 0
Ibid., 62.
'9lbid., 130.
20 Ibid., 134, fn 108.
18
The primary concerns of credit claiming and position taking thus
overshadow the pursuit of good government. Mayhew provides an excellent
example of the how the tendency toward symbolic action is manifest: "When
water pollution became an issue, it was more or less predictable that Congress
would pass a law characterized as an antipollution act, that the law would take
the form of a grant program for localities, and that it would not achieve its
proclaimed end."2
If congressional pressure for national security mission
assignment adheres to these same conventions, one should see evidence that
symbolic value and constituent gain outweighs policy considerations in agent
choice.
Bureaucratic and Interest Politics
Literature related to the behavior of government bureaucracies could aid
our understanding of mission assignment choice. Works in this genre stress the
importance of processes, relationships, and incentives in evaluating and
explaining government decisions. Graham Allison, William Niskanen, James Q.
Wilson, and Peri Arnold each proffer possible theories that could explain, or be
modified to explain, mission assignment.
Graham Allison's Essence of Decision contains perhaps the most widelyread example of a bureaucratic politics theory.
Allison's model holds that
''government decisions and actions result from a political process" in which the
21 Ibid.,
134.
interests and power of conflicting parties play a prominent role. "What moves the
chess pieces," he explains, "is not simply the reasons that support a course of
action, or the routines of organization that enact an alternative, but the power and
skill of proponents and opponents of the action in question." 2 The key factors in
analyzing a decision through the lens of bureaucratic politics are who the players
are; where they stand on the issue (which is derived from organizational
interests); their actual and perceived power relative to other actors; and the realm
of their interaction, usually defined by the broader political environment in which
the decision-making process takes place.23
Although Allison does not directly address the national security agent
selection process, the bureaucratic politics model is easily applied to this
phenomenon. For political decision makers to assign a mission to the Defense
Department, for instance, bureaucratic actors must be arrayed in such a way that
some combination of those with the most interest and power support the mission
assignment. If the assignment is given over the objection of the military, it must
be the case that the forces in favor of imposition have more bureaucratic power
or interest than the military establishment. The same logic can be applied to
selection of civilian agents. Simply testing these hypotheses would contribute to
the political science literature.
22
21
Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1971), 145.
Ibid., 164-173.
Mission assignment could be driven by bureaucrats themselves, seeking
to perpetuate their organizations by adding new tasks. Since Weber first wrote of
bureaucracy, the study of organizations has examined the extent to which groups
seek to expand their reach and budgets as an end unto themselves.
Management sciences notable Peter Drucker stated, "'Success' in the publicservice institution is defined by getting a larger budget rather than attaining
results."24 In a zero-sum or low growth environment, agencies that do not
maximize their budgets will eventually be eclipsed by other agencies that have
made a better case to Congress for budget growth.
William Niskanen's work is notable in this field. Niskanen theorized that
bureaucrats are utilitarian, motivated by salary, reputation, power, ease of
management, and expansion of output. 26 As a result, bureaucrats maximize their
organization's budgets, or, as he later amended, their discretionary budgets.
Since public bureaucracies cannot make a profit, maximization is constrained by
the limitation that it cannot exceed the "minimum total costs of supplying the
output expected by the bureau's sponsor. "27 Bureaucrats must thus oversupply
services and inflate costs in order to justify expanded budgets, and government
services along with it. The bureaucracy's sponsors in the Executive and
Legislative Branches do not have the information necessary to properly oversee
Quoted in Randal O'Toole, Reforming the Forest Service (Washington: Island Press, 1988),
104.
25 Ibid., 107.
24
26
William A.Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine,
Atherton, 1971), 38.
27 Ibid., 42.
the agency, with resultant inefficiencies in government services. Niskanen
believes outsourcing should correct for these problems by introducing market
incentives to improve performance.28
If Niskanen's theory applies to mission assignment, one should see
agencies competing for new missions that promise higher budgets. These
bureaus, and not their sponsors in Congress or the Executive Branch, should be
the primary engines for expansion. Moreover, budgets for any new missions
should expand over time, creating an oversupply of mission capability. One
should also see an excess of capacity or mission capability relative to demand
for capability. As a corollary, when effective congressional oversight mitigates
principal-agent information gaps, new missions should be less expansive over
time.
James Q. Wilson takes issues with Niskanen's budget maximization
theory. In Bureaucracy, Wilson argues that government agencies and those
populating them are guided by many more incentives than commonly
acknowledged. A skeptic of general theories of bureaucratic behavior, Wilson
argues that "bureaucrats have a variety of preferences; only part of their behavior
can be explained by assuming they are struggling to get bigger salaries or fancier
Niskanen's budget maximization theory, and its policy prescription for greater outsourcing of
government services, has its critics. One critique is its inapplicability to a field such as US
national security, where there are limited private sector parallels. John Conybeare, for example,
argues that the more purely public a good is,the more difficult the comparison to private sector
output. "Markets," Conybeare argues, "will probably fail to provide any of the public good where
there are a large number of beneficiaries." John A. C. Conybeare, "Bureaucracy, Monopoly, and
Competition: A Critical Analysis of the Budget-Maximizing Model of Bureaucracy," American
28
Journal of Political Science 28 (August 1984): 492-493.
offices or larger budgets." 29 He points to the effects of institutional culture,
statutes and regulations, the pressures exerted by all three federal branches of
government, and individual leadership capabilities and style, among other
factors, on decision-making.
Wilson places special emphasis on the role of Congress, calling it "the
architect of the bureaucracy." 3 0 He notes that, at times, Congress chooses to
limit its power over agencies. His examples imply that it does so, however, only
when such limitations bring potential political gain to members. More generally,
Wilson argues that the extent of congressional influence on (and interest in) an
agency will depend on the political environment in which that agency operates
and the types of tasks it performs.
During peacetime, most national security
agencies fall into Wilson's definition of a procedural organization.
Such
organizations have clearly defined and relatively visible tasks and processes, but
the outcomes of their actions are difficult to measure.
Wilson argues that
procedural agencies are "vulnerable to any politician who wants to tell them how
to do their job but deriving little help from them in evaluating how well the job is
done."3 1
As with the type of task an agency is asked to undertake, the political
environment contributes to how Congress acts with respect to agency activities.
James Q.Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (United
States of America: Basic Books, Inc., 1989), xviii.
29
3
31
Ibid., 236.
Ibid., 245.
Wilson's description of an entrepreneurial environment appears to point to the
causes of a congressionally-imposed assignment of emerging national security
missions. Policy entrepreneurship often occurs on the heels of a scandal or
significant media coverage that "inflames public sentiment."32
It relies on
members of Congress seeking an issue on which to campaign, concentration of
the costs of action, such as on a particular agency, and a widely distributed
benefit from the action. Entrepreneurial solutions, such as the creation of a new
agency, are obviously easiest to impose when opposition is modest, but even
when a particular agency or interest group opposes a change, entrepreneurship
can succeed.
Wilson's treatment of the president's role in agency life is equally
illuminating. A good president seeks to make agencies accountable. The tools
he uses to do so are choosing leaders, changing procedures, reorganizing
agencies, and ensuring coordination. In appointing people, the president often
seeks those who are ideologically compatible. In managing the bureaucracy,
presidents frequently centralize control in White House operations.
In
reorganizing, presidents pursue a "fad diet" approach to improving outcomes.3 3
And, in coordinating, the president seeks to reduce agency duplication and
harmonize competing interests.
32
Ibid., 78.
33
Ibid., 264.
Wilson's brief description of presidential motivations for reorganization is
probably the most instructive of his insights for understanding how the chief
executive views agency selection. "A reorganization promises a painless way of
making big changes," he states. "Of course, not all reorganizations are intended
to make a difference; some... were intended chiefly to satisfy campaign promises
or to appease politically important interest groups."34
Agency mission
assignment, whether accomplished through reorganization or simple addition,
can be seen as one manifestation of the president's attempt to live up to public
expectations or campaign promises at low political cost. In the area of national
security, Wilson predicts that a president's routine influence is likely to be greater
than that of Congress because of its procedural nature, in which there are
distributed benefits and concentrated costs.
Complementing and often reflecting the academic and business literature
on government decision-making is the series of government reform commissions,
panels, and reviews that have accompanied the growth of the Executive Branch.
Peri Arnold has chronicled the rise of presidentially-created panels.3 5 Arnold
distinguishes three periods of influence on the reform of government processes.
In the first era, from 1905 to 1949, reform efforts aimed to describe and justify
presidential power as a means of better managing the administration of
government.
In the second era, from 1949-1972, presidential commissions
focused on the need to increase analytic capacity in the government, such as the
1
Ibid., 265.
3 For a brief summary of his analysis, see Peri E. Arnold, "Reforms Changing Role," Public
Administration Review 55 (September-October 1995): 407-418.
Defense Department's systems analysis approach developed under Robert
McNamara. The third phase, begun in 1976 and continuing today, seeks to bring
efficiency through customer focus, privatization, and improved
process
performance.
Whereas structural reorganizations were prominent in the first phase, the
latter two phases focused more attention on business process improvements.
Such evolutions are unsurprising, as they mimic more general trends in
management theory.
They are nevertheless important in their implications.
Arnold argues that the first two periods of reform literature aimed to create
political power for the president through the guise of apolitical administrative
changes. If there is a relationship between the motivation for creating these
panels between 1905 and 1972, then that for national security mission
assignment over the same period, when instigated by the Executive Branch,
ought to display a public rationale of apolitical, administrative (re)alignment. One
might nevertheless find evidence of private political motivations.
Arnold's analysis, if applicable to mission assignment, indicates a shift in
rationale for reorganization and reform by the mid-1970s.
Presidential
statements about mission assignment after this period should indicate a desire to
reduce public discord with government operations, even if at the expense of
strengthening administrative rationality.
As compared to prior eras, private
statements should be focused less on accreting power to the Executive Branch
than on improving electoral prospects.
"Comprehensive reform identifies a
president with aspirations or values that might guide voters' choices," Arnold
states. "It is not the activity of reform that can rise to the level of a major issue,
but comprehensive reform can serve a president politically by evoking symbols
and values that are major concerns with the electorate."36 Could the same be
said for national security agent selection?
This chapter presents the state of the field on agency mission assignment
and decision-making in the national security realms. The literature summarized
above illuminated several themes that may bear on how and why US decision
makers select military or non-military agents for pressing national security
missions.
These include strategic factors relating to the environment
(Huntington), the role of the military in society (Janowitz, Huntington, and
Andreski), electoral rationales (Wilson, Mayhew, and Arnold), and agency
motives and interactions (Allison, Niskanen, and Wilson).
36
Peri E.Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning,
1905-1996 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 380.
3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
In Chapter 2, I established that multiple social science and public
administration fields can shed light on the question of national security mission
assignment. At the same time, the discussion in Chapter 2 underscores the
inadequacy of existing literature in determining how agent selection occurs in the
United States. This appears to be the case for domestic as well as foreign policy
choices. Limiting myself to US national security policy as a window of inquiry, I
seek to understand what geostrategic, societal, and agency factors may affect
the assignment of missions to military or civilian agents.
Inferring Theories of Mission Assignment
There are no existing theories of national security mission assignment.
Some of the literature delineated in Chapter 2 could be extrapolated to create
such a theory, especially the work relating to models of interest politics and
bureaucratic and congressional decision-making. Further, civil-military relations
literature may provide unique insight into the way in which American political
leaders view the uses of the military in peacetime.
The research design
therefore focuses on gaining case study insights from which one might infer a
theory of mission assignment with strong explanatory power in the national
security realm.
Work from the fields of civil-military relations, public
administration, and political science reviewed in Chapter 2 point to several key
factors, summarized below, that may contribute to national security mission
assignment. In each case study probed in Chapters 4 and 5, I assess the
potential role of these factors in the search for a possible mission assignment
causal chain.
STRATEGIC FACTORS
Nature of the strategic environment:
During the Cold War, the military was
almost entirely focused on its warfighting mission. Some observers believe that
in the 1990s, political authorities increased the number of non-traditional military
missions because a strategic vacuum allowed them to do so.
In the post-
September 11 environment, the military is once again deeply engaged. This
period has led to a counter claim: that the dramatic threat posed by Al Qaeda
and associated movements has ushered in an era of militarization of national
security. Is there a relationship between the security of the international system
and the selection of agents for national security missions? Does peace favor the
use of the military or does conflict?
SOCIETAL FACTORS
Perceptions of the Military and Civilian Agents: Is the concern about a standing
military that is rooted in American liberal tradition easing? Although concern is at
times expressed about the possible militarization of national security, since the
1980s the majority of Americans have expressed general comfort with the
military and its role in missions from counternarcotics to homeland security to
policing abroad. In 1971, the Harris Poll found only 27 percent of Americans had
confidence in their military. Since 1989, however, the same poll has named the
US military as the most admired institution in the country.37
As traditional
liberalism abates, has circumspection about the military likewise eased and
relative confidence in civilian institutions declined?
Do decision-makers view either the military or civilians as more effective agents
for particular types of missions? Is there a belief among political decision-makers
that assigning a task to the military offers a better chance of success than
assigning it to a domestic agency?
How might this factor differ in cases of
civilian agent selection?
POLITICAL FACTORS
Electoral Value: Does one agent or another provide greater electoral value to the
decision-maker(s)? How much do distributive politics, symbolic action, and the
concentration of executive power appear to weigh in the agency selection
decision?
AGENCY FACTORS
Agency design:
Many civilian agencies are sized and shaped for day-to-day
operations; the U.S. military is by design a surge force, with a substantial
capability available on a daily basis. Agencies are also designed to cultivate
See The Harris Poll, "Big Drop in Confidence in Leaders of Major Institutions: Leaders of the
Military Only One of 16 Categories to Improve Since Last Year," #22 (February 28, 2008),
37
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris poll/index.asp?PID=876 and Jim Garamone, "Harris Poll
Shows Military Still Most-Admired U.S. Institution," American Forces Press Service (7 March
2006).
particular expertise:
the Department of State provides diplomacy, the US
Department of Justice provides law enforcement, the US Agency for International
Development works against global poverty.
Can national security agent
selection be correlated with the nature of the mission and the nature and
expertise of the agent?
Budgetary consequences: Mission assignment requires resourcing.
Both the
president, in developing the budget, and Congress, in authorizing and
appropriating funds, have a role in creating and sustaining or altering agencies'
resources for missions. Do they find ease and advantage in funding some types
of projects through one agent over another?
Does the relative size of the
Defense Department create an almost irrefutable logic that causes leaders to
refer it for new missions?
Inter- and intra-agency politics: Within the bureaucracies themselves, are there
substantial push and pull pressures to assign a mission to a particular agent?
For example, are there subunits within the military establishment lobbying for a
task, or is there an attempt by other agents to pass off unwanted missions to an
obedient, can-do military?
Case Universe
To weigh the strength of these factors on national security mission
assignment, I assessed a series of cases from the following categories:
1) National security missions seemingly within the purview of another
agent-or sought by another agent-that were assigned to the
Defense Department,
2) National security missions seemingly within the purview of the
Department of Defense-or sought by the Department of Defensethat were assigned to a civilian agency.
For purposes of scoping the case universe, national security herein is defined to
include the defense of the United States of America, protection of its
constitutional system of government, and the advancement of US interests
around the globe.38 Mission is defined in accordance with common military
usage: a duty assigned to an individual or unit; a task.39 Mission assignment is
coded as civilian if a civilian agency is assigned responsibility for a mission, such
as in statute or executive order. Mission assignment is coded as military if an
element of the Department of Defense was given responsibility for the mission,
such as in statute or executive order. I included the National Guard and US
Coast Guard operating in their Title 10 roles as elements of the Department of
Defense. 40
There is significant debate over the appropriate scope and definition of national security. The
definition used here conforms to "traditionalist" views of national security and is drawn from
President George W. Bush, Organization of the National Security System, National Security
Presidential Directive-1 (NSPD-1) (February 13, 2001): 1. As of this writing, President Obama
has not updated Bush's definition.
38
39
Derived from the DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, as
amended through 17 October 2008: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/m/03480.html.
4 Except when explicitly directed to operate as an arm of the Department of Defense under Title
10 of US Code, the US Coast Guard is an element of the Department of Homeland Security.
Likewise, National Guard units serve in their state capacity (Title 32) except when expressly
directed to operate as an arm of the Department of Defense (Title 10).
Two further limitations on the case universe are important. First, the data
set is limited to agency selection within the United States. The proscribed role of
the US military in American society, the absence of a constabulary force or
national police force to whom political leaders could turn for "non-traditional" or
paramilitary security missions, and the interactive effects of the competing
branches of federal power, widely cited in past literature, should make the factors
affecting mission assignment unique in the United States. Second, the case
universe is limited to instances of national security mission assignment since
World War 11. The rapid expansion of the congressional committee system, the
growth and institutionalization of the Executive Branch's national security
structure, and modern scholarly and public views of relative US military and civil
servant roles and capabilities all trace their origins to the years immediately
following the US defeat of Japan, marking the distinctiveness of the current era.
Using all of these parameters, I conducted a full-text search of the New
York Times from January 1, 1946 to January 1, 2008 to identify possible cases of
US national security mission assignment. My primary search term was "military."
In cases where political leaders chose civilian agents in lieu of military
alternatives, the term "military" should nevertheless appear.
I then cross-
checked this approach by reviewing all instances of "mission" and, separately,
"national security" used in the New York Times.
These searches revealed
eighteen cases of national security mission selection over the past fifty years.
Table 1 displays the universe of plausible cases.
Table 1. Mission Assignment Case History41
Agent Assignment
Civilian Military Mixed
Comments
X
The Atomic Energy Commission was established as a civilian
agency after consideration of making it report to the Secretary of
War and having military representation
National Security Issue
Atomic energy, 1945-1946
Administration
1949
of Germany,
1944-
Administration of Japan, 1945-1952
Domestic intelligence
Foreign intelligence, 1947-present
X
After clear perception of civilian inadequacies for the mission, and immediate
need for military control following the end of the war, the military is assigned
responsibility for a "middle" period of administration. Despite some discussion
of the need to transition to civilian US administration, it did not occur.
X
No evidence of potential US civilian leadership.
X
No evidence of potential US military leadership
X CIA was established as a separate, civilian agency, but military intelligence
services were allowed to remain independent.
Space exploration, 1957-present
X
NASA was established as a separate, civilian agency.
Civil defense, 1950-present
X
Narcotics detection and monitoring,
1989-present
X
Vietnam Pacification, 1967-1975
Development assistance (USAID and
Peace Corps), 1945-present
Civilian agency (1950-1961); military lead (1961-1979); civilian lead (1979present).
Congress pushed President George H. W. Bush to give DoD the lead, which
he did despite significant military opposition.
X
X
Other agencies,
including DoD and the intelligence community, retain sizable space-related
programs, but NASA leads for space exploration.
Johnson created the civil operations and revolutionary development support
(CORDS) structure to have civilian leadership but be embedded in a military
organization (MACV). In practice, operated with relative independence.
No evidence of potential military role. There was some consideration of
allowing peace corps service count as selective service duty.
Data set derived from review of New York Times archives, January 1, 1946-January 1, 2008.
Agent Assignment
Civilian Military Mixed Comments
National Security Issue
Civil engineering, 1945-present
Domestic law enforcement
and
X
X Army Corps of Engineers frequently used for non-military construction.
Clear civilian lead, with decentralized, federal approach. DoD provides
support upon request.
disaster relief, 1945-present
X In 1995, Congress assigned lead to DoD. DoD subsequently transferred the
mission to the Department of Justice. The mission is now under the purview of
the Department of Homeland Security.
Training domestic first responders in
WMD consequence management,
1995-present
Training foreign police, 1957-present
Eisenhower created the USAID Office of Public Safety. Congress banned
X
training in 1974 amid the "Family Jewels" intelligence scandals. Congress
subsequently allowed ever-broader exceptions, especially for counternarcotics
purposes. Leadership has shifted from USAID to Justice to State. Most
recently, DoD has assumed significant responsibility in Iraq and Afghanistan
and has been granted some flexible authorities for providing foreign security
force (including police) assistance, provided the State Department concurs.
X
Stabilization and reconstruction/
peacekeeping
In non-permissive or semi-permissive environments, this mission has largely
been military-led due to limited civilian capacity and exigencies of post-conflict
environments. The various Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT) concepts
employed in Iraq and Afghanistan attempt to mix membership, akin to the
Vietnam-era CORDS program.
Cyber defense, 2003-present
Critical
infrastructure
protection,
X
X
2003-present
Counterterrorism, 1970s-present
X
President George W. Bush created a cyber czar in 2001. In 2003, Congress
assigned responsibility for cyber security to the newly formed Department of
Homeland Security. DoD has responsibility for protecting its own systems and
assisting others as requested.
The Department of Homeland Security is assigned leadership for domestic
critical infrastructure protection. DoD has responsibility for protecting its own
infrastructure and ensuring protection of the defense industrial base.
The State Department is the lead agency for counterterrorism overseas; the
FBI has lead within the US. DoD typically has overseas lead when military
assets are required. To date, DoD has never had domestic lead.
This case universe appears relatively small. The small data size could be
due to the rarity of an explicit civilian versus military agent selection
phenomenon. The presence of several "mixed" agent selection cases, in which
evidence points to different agents used at different times or for different mission
sub-sets, seems to underscore the likely infrequency of civil-military agent tradeoffs in post-World War II American history. Italicized in Table 1 are cases where
agency assignment appears to have been uncontested. There are most likely
many more such cases that never rise to public interest or reporting but are
instead handled as routine matters of administration and governance.
Alternatively, the paucity of cases may be due to my reliance on the New
York Times. If explicit agent choice typically occurs behind-the-scenes in the
bureaucracies of Washington, it may not be reported. If agent choice does not
elicit sufficient opposition from the "losing" party, it also may not be reported.
And, if the public or elites are uninterested in why a civilian or military agency
may be, or has been, selected for a new mission, it most certainly will not be
reported.
Despite these cautions, the eighteen-case data set provides a sufficient
number and range of cases to test for causes of civilian or military choice in
national security mission assignment. The case set itself also demonstrates the
importance of the questions posed.
Issues such as space research, drug
interdiction, atomic energy research and control, and cyber policy required a
conscious choice of civilian or military leadership over the alternative.
The
implications of these decisions have been significant, both in terms of the
missions' success and how the mission is perceived by political elites and the
American public.
The next two chapters step through the evidence for mission assignment
decisions in eight cases. Chapter 3 illustrates three cases of military mission
assignment and two cases of civilian mission assignment. Chapter 4 delves indepth on mission assignment for civil defense, which switched from civilian to
military and back to civilian again, creating three additional unique cases of
mission assignment.
4. SELECTED CASES OF AGENT CHOICE
The decision to assign a national security mission to one agency over
another has been documented well over one dozen times since the end of World
War II. This chapter explores five such cases that cover every decade from the
1940s to present. In three, elected officials chose military agents for important
new missions. These are post-World War 11military governance in Germany,
counternarcotics detection and monitoring at the end of the 1980s, and domestic
weapons of mass destruction training programs in the 1990s. Two cases that
serve to highlight the factors at work when civilian agents are selected then
follow. These are the 1957 creation of a civilian NASA and assignment of
responsibility for training foreign police, which continues as an issue in current
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Choosing Military Agents
Since the early 1990s, civil-military and national security experts have
heatedly debated the soundness of expanding missions for the military.
In the
post-September 11 era, some have begun to claim that foreign policy itself has
become "securitized," from the role of Combatant Commanders in diplomacy to
new authorizations and appropriations for the Defense Department in the realms
of development assistance, reconstruction and stabilization efforts, and the
42
See, for example, Rudolph C. Barnes, Jr., Military Legitimacy: Might and Right in the New
Millennium (London: Frank Cass, 1996); Feaver and Kohn; and Stephen J. Morrison and
Kathleen H. Hicks, Report of the CSIS Task Force on Non-Traditional Security Assistance
(Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008).
training and equipping of foreign security forces. Although perhaps not reaching
its rhetorical apex until after the Cold War, the phenomenon of expanding military
use, particularly for the Army, is hardly unique to the current period. In the
1 9 th
Century, for instance, the US Army was called upon to manage several natural
resource programs, including a "lead-lease" program, whereby land owners
would lease their territory to the US government for mineral extraction, and
domestic water tributary management. 43 It also housed the national weather
service until 1890.44 During World War I and World War II, the Army guarded key
economic facilities. Following World War II, the military assumed governance
responsibility for both Japan and the US sector of West Germany. With victory in
Europe preceding that in the Pacific by several months, the decision to have the
military govern West Germany until a transfer of power to the newly sovereign
nation was perhaps the first national security mission assignment of the modern
US era.
Governing Germany
One year into the Second World War, the US Army established a School
of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia and a Military Governance
Division within the War Department. Although the Army's desire for military
43
On lead-leasing, see Christopher McGrory Klyza, "The United States Army, Natural Resources
and Political Development in the Nineteenth Century," Polity 35 (2002): 1-28. On water
management, see Arthur Maas, Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers
Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1951).
4 Joseph M.Hawes, "The Signal Corps and its Weather Service, 1870-1830," Military Affairs 30
(Summer 1966): 68-76.
governance capacity actually preceded the US entry into the War, that conflict
made its necessity
The School of Military Government had been conceived before Pearl
Harbor to remedy a potential deficiency by providing the Army with a
nucleus of trained military government officers. However, the country was
then plunged into a global war, and long before the first class assembled
at Charlottesville, the Army's eventual engagement in military government
was inevitable. What had been a contingency was soon to become a
reality and a vital one.45
The Army defined its intended mission as establishing a "phase 1"of military
governance in the immediate aftermath of hostilities and a "phase 2" in which it
would hand off governance tasks to civilian control during a period of
occupation.4 6 Despite this doctrine, the War Department actually assumed local,
host nation control would be restored immediately following phase 1,thus
eliminating any need to train U.S. civilian agencies in foreign governance.
The Army appears to have had two primary motives behind its desire to
remedy its inadequacies for post-conflict governance. The first was a desire to
prevent the creation of competing or parallel civilian and military chains of
command following the cessation of hostilities. Such duality would complicate
management of the battlespace and threaten the on-ground commander's ability
to control all US government activity in his area of operations. The second was a
Earl F.Ziemke, The U.S. Army In The Occupation Of Germany, 1944-1946 (Washington:
Center of Military History, United States Army, 1990), 8.
46 Synopsis of War Department Program for Military Governance, 4 September 42,
PMGO files,
321, Provost Marshall General's Office & MGD, in Harry L. Coles and Albert K.Weinberg, Civil
Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors, (Washington: Center for Military History, United States
Army, 1986), 19.
fear that civilians, if given responsibility, would fail in whole or in part, leaving the
United States unprepared for governance operations and risking the loss of
strategic ground the military would have gained.
Some civilian agency heads were suspicious about the Army's ambitions
for military governance and its capability to fulfill these ambitions. At a 29
October 1942 cabinet meeting, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes raised
concern about the potential imperialistic undertones of Army leadership in postconflict governance.47 Civilian officials also questioned the quality of the
Charlottesville school's student body and faculty. Some accused the Army of
packing the school with Republican, anti-New Dealers who might be antidemocratic or even racist. They also found the faculty wanting in prestige and
inexperienced in key governance sub-fields, particularly international law. These
trepidations were not universally shared among civilians, of course. Secretary of
Treasury Hans Morgenthau, for example, had relayed his satisfaction with the
Army's plan to the War Department's leadership.4 8
Nevertheless, President Roosevelt was sufficiently concerned following
the October cabinet meeting to write to Secretary of War Henry Stimson
reproving him on the establishment of the War Department's Charlottesville
school:
Notes from Cabinet meeting dictated by Under Secretary of War Judge Robert Patterson.
Memo, Col Robert N. Young, SGS, for CG, SOS, 30 October 43 [sic], PMGO files, 321.19, MG, in
Coles and Weinberg, 233.
48 Notes from Under Secretary of War Judge Robert Patterson telephone conversation with Army
Provost Marshall Gullion, 4 September 1942, in Coles and Weinberg, 18-19.
4
I understand that the Provost Marshal General is training a substantial
number of men from civil life to assume the duties of Military Governor or
civilian advisors to Military Governors of occupied territories. I should like
to have from him a complete explanation of the project--a list of the
personnel, officer and civilian, under such training, and a statement of
their previous experience.
This whole matter is something which should have been taken up with me
in the first instance. The governing of occupied territories may be of many
kinds but in most instances it is a civilian task and requires absolutely firstclass men and not second-string men.4 9
Roosevelt's concern prompted White House officials to investigate the Army's
efforts. Roosevelt sent an emissary to view the school and meet with faculty and
students. His report back to Roosevelt was positive, and for at least seven
months following the October cabinet meeting, Roosevelt appears to have been
complacent about the Army's doctrine, schoolhouse, and de facto leadership.
Given his stated belief that post-conflict governance was a civilian task, the
reason for such complacency was likely his recognition of inadequate civilian
alternatives to the Army. One of Secretary Ickes's advisors lamented that,
despite their possession of the "specialized experience and skill needed for postwar world reconstruction," civilians had offered not offered a viable plan for the
world. "The Army did," he told the Secretary of the Interior. "And so the Army is
moving in by default."5 0
The realization that civilian agencies were not yet up to post-hostility
challenges was reinforced by ongoing experience in North Africa. There, the
Memo, FDR for the Secretary of War, 29 Oct 42, in Coles and Weinberg, 22.
Memo, Saul K. Padover, Dept of the Interior, for Ickes, 8 Jan 43, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library,
in Coles and Weinberg, 26.
49
5
State Department was in charge of all political and economic issues, working
alongside the military. In addition, the Bureau of Economic Warfare and
Department of Agriculture had a development role and the Lend-Lease Agency a
procurement, finance, and distribution role. All four agencies appeared to fail in
executing their missions, let alone in integrating them. Further complicating the
problem, they all operated alongside the US military, under General Dwight D.
Eisenhower's leadership. Eisenhower chafed at the State Department
representatives' dual reporting chain and the confusion over civilian and military
roles and responsibilities. He wrote to General Marshall, "Iam having as much
trouble with civilian forces behind aiding us as I am with the enemy in front of us."51
James E. Webb, Director of the White House's Bureau of the Budget, sent
Roosevelt a memo on 6 February 1943 concluding, "It is the confusion in the
basic war jobs-the multiplicity of operating agencies-which complicates the
task" of governing North Africa.
President Roosevelt did not necessarily conclude from this experience
that unified command of post-conflict operations under military leadership was
the preferred solution to this confusion. In June 1943, he once again
admonished Stimson to limit the scope of military involvement in such missions:
The civilian agencies have considerable experience and talent that it
would be difficult and undesirable for the Army to duplicate. The military
operations of our Army should not be unnecessarily diluted or diverted by
the questions affecting relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction, restoration of
51Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, Soldiers and Civil Power: Supporting Or Substituting Civil Authorities
in Modern Peace Operations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 27.
52 Memo, James E. Webb, Director of BoB, for Roosevelt, 6 Feb 42, WDCSA files, 386, Africa,
1942, in Coles and Weinberg, 40.
trade, strategic procurement and development, repatriation, property
rights, legal systems, political warfare, political organization, and other
essentially civilian problems... .Accordingly, I want your Civil Affairs
Division and other parts of the Service, to work with these agencies in
closest co-operation and to use them to the maximum extent possible.
This will leave you free to carry on the primary task which you are facingthe execution of military operations against the enemy.5 3
Roosevelt's memo to Stimson followed the creation within the State Department
of two coordinators: the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations
and the Office of Foreign Economic Coordination. There lay great hope in the
creation of these civilian coordinators, but their fate followed an all-too familiar
bureaucratic path. Initially, other civilian agencies resisted their coordination role,
and their co-existence with various other agencies, positions, and committees
across the government only increased confusion over responsibilities. The lack
of progress prompted President Roosevelt to consolidate coordination offices, as
well as the Lend-Lease Administration and the Office of Economic Warfare, into
a newly-created Foreign Economic Administration (FEA).5 The FEA centralized
authorities and resources for controlling foreign purchases of strategic materials,
relief operations in liberated countries, and the supply of arms to allied nations.
In creating the FEA, however, Roosevelt replaced one civilian coordination
seam with another. Time magazine reported shortly after Roosevelt's decision
that Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had accreted significant power for
civilian reconstruction, was pleased that the State Department could now return
5
5
Letter to Stimson, 3 June 1943, CAD files, 334, OFEC (5-29-43) (1), Coles and Weinberg, 100.
Executive Order 9380, September 25, 1943.
to a strictly diplomatic lane.55 In reality, however, State Department officials
treated the FEA as a competing power center, and civilian capacity-building
continued to flounder.
While civilian agency efforts struggled, the Army established a Civil Affairs
Division and began to prepare in earnest for "phase 1"operations. In November
1943, President Roosevelt assigned the Army responsibility for initial
humanitarian relief in the event of Germany's collapse or surrender. His
statement upon doing so betrayed his grudging acceptance that civilian
organizations could not provide immediate relief on the scale required by a
collapse of the Nazi regime:
Although other agencies of the Government are preparing themselves for
the work that must be done in connection with the relief and rehabilitation
of liberated areas, it is quite apparent if prompt results are to be obtained
the Army will have to assume the initial burden of shipping and distributing
relief supplies. This will not only be the case in the event that active
military operations are under way, but also in the event of a German
collapse. I envisage that in the event of a German collapse, the need for
the Army to undertake this work will be all the more apparent.
Therefore, I direct that you have the Army undertake the planning
necessary to enable it to carry out this task to the end that it shall be
prepared to perform this function, pending such time as civilian agencies
must be prepared to carry out the longer range program of relief.
After that point, civilian agencies appear to have ceded the principle that all
immediate post-hostility, or phase 1, nation-building would be led by the
"U.S. at War: Bold Stroke," Time XLVII (October 4, 1943):
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,932133,00.html.
5 See Ltr, Roosevelt to Stimson, 10 Nov 43, WDSCA files, 014 (1943), Coles and Weinberg, 108,
and Minutes, Mtg in McCloy's office, 14 Jan 1944, ASD, ID, Hist of Civ Sup, DS-1 71, in Coles and
Weinberg, 110.
55
military.57 The Army established coordination mechanisms with the State
Department and the FEA. By late July 1945, President Truman formally
assigned the Army all responsibility for political and economic governance of
Germany, and on October 1, 1945, General Eisenhower assumed the leadership
of the Office of Military Government US.
Countemarcotics
In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon established the Drug Enforcement
Agency to consolidate federal drug control efforts. At the time, Nixon declared:
The federal government is fighting the war on drug abuse under a distinct
handicap, for its efforts are those of a loosely confederated alliance facing
a resourceful, elusive, worldwide enemy. Certainly, the cold-blooded
underworld networks that funnel narcotics from suppliers all over the world
are no respecters of the bureaucratic dividing lines that now complicate
our anti-drug efforts.58
The military had largely been on the sidelines of the "war on drugs" prior to
DEA's establishment. It had provided ground sensors to the US Border Patrol in
1966 to aid in the tracking of smugglers and illegal immigrants. It had also given
the Department of Justice a Vietnam-era surplus plane for use in tracking and
interdiction. The limited nature of the military's involvement continued through
the 1970s. In 1977, the Hawaii National Guard provided helicopter support to
that state's efforts to find marijuana fields. That same year, the US Army
"On 15 November 1943, the Secretary of War held a conference... at which it was stated that
the Secretary of War and Secretary of State had agreed that initial responsibility for civilian relief
in occupied areas should rest with the Army, and that civilian agencies would concern themselves
with the long-range program afterwards." Draft of Memo for Rcd, OCS, 18 Dec 43, CAD files,
400.38 (2-20-43) (1), sec. 3, in Coles and Weinberg, 109.
58 Cited in The Drug Enforcement Administration, 1970-1975, accessed at
http://www.usdoj.qov/dea/pubs/history/1970-1975.pdf: 13.
57
provided Mexico with helicopter equipment and pilot training in support of
Operation Condor, a Mexican aerial herbicide spraying campaign.
In 1981, Congress amended the Posse Comitatus Act to allow a limited
range of military assistance to domestic law enforcement agencies. The Posse
Comitatus Act prevents the U.S. Army or Air Force from enforcing the nation's
laws or otherwise acting as the "power or force of the county" within the United
States, except where authorized by Congress.5 9 The 1981 amendment
responded directly to public pressure for a stronger federal counternarcotics
effort. It authorized the Defense Department to loan equipment, facilities and
people to law enforcement agencies; operate military equipment used in
monitoring and communicating the movement of air and sea traffic, and operate
military equipment for overseas interdictions that supported law enforcement
agencies, if supported by a joint declaration of emergency by the United States
and the foreign nation. The amendments left intact Posse Comitatus'
fundamental tenet that military personnel could not conduct search and seizure
or arrest activities unless otherwise authorized by law.60
The 1981 Congressional amendment was not supported by any of the
federal agencies involved in counternarcotics or by the military itself. "Infact," as
a pair of researchers aptly described, "the effort prompted an unlikely alliance
between federal drug enforcement officials, who feared DOD dominance over a
59
60
United States Code, Title 18, Part 1,Chapter 67, Section 1358.
The National Defense Authorization Act for 1982, Public Law 97-86, Section 908.
high-profile mission; DOD officials, who feared a resource drain away from the
department's primary mission; and civil libertarians, who feared an eventual
military state." 61 Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had been a
strong opponent of DoD leadership in counternarcotics efforts, began systematic
provision of support to domestic law enforcement agencies in accordance with
the amendments to the Posse Comitatus Act. He issued a Department Directive
in March 198262 to guide the handling of requests for assistance from civilian law
enforcement agencies, and by the end of that year had approved 121 of 126
requests for assistance. Only six months later, requests for assistance had
ballooned to 453, of which DoD had approved 436.63 In the maritime realm
alone, US Naval patrol days on counternarcotics missions rose from zero in 1983
to 2,325 in 1987. This followed the 1982 decision to allow US Coast Guard
personnel to ride on Navy ships to conduct law enforcement.64
Throughout the 1980s, US public concern about drugs continued to
increase. Between 1982 and 1986, the percent of public respondents to a
Chicago Foreign Affairs Council poll who stated that drug abuse was one of the
three biggest problems facing the United States leapt from 3 to 27 percent.
Taken at the height of the Cold War, the 1986 response level on drug abuse
Gary Felicetti and John Luce, "The Posse Comitatus Act: Liberation from the Lawyers,"
Parameters (Autumn 2004): 94-107.
61
62
Department of Defense, DoD Directive 5525.5, Department of Defense Cooperation with
Civilian Law Enforcement Officials, March 22, 1982.
Thomas W. Crouch, An Annotated Bibliography on Military Involvement in Counterdrug
63
Operations, 1980-1990 (Langley, VA: Army-Air Force Center for Low Intensity Conflict,
September 1991), 4.
64
LTC Juan L.Orama, US Military Evolution in Counternarcotics Operations in Latin America
(Strategic Studies Institute, USAWC: 10 April 2001), 9.
exceeded that for every foreign policy category, including "war/peace/defense"
and was second only to a catch-all "other" category within domestic affairs.
Foreign policy leaders were substantially less alarmist over this same period,
with concern about drug abuse rising from 1 to 8 percent. 5 Even more telling
was the difference of opinion between public and elite in 1986 on support for the
use of US military forces overseas in drug operations. Whereas 29 percent of
the public expressed support for military counternarcotics operations, only 7
percent of elites agreed.66
US military personnel did in fact participate in a DEA-led operation to
disrupt cocaine production in Bolivia in 1986. The congressionally-authorized
Operation Blast Furnace constituted the first use of active duty soldiers in a
counternarcotics mission on foreign territory. It involved six Blackhawk
helicopters and 160 US Army personnel. That same year, the Congress passed
an Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which authorized greater DoD spending in support of
interdiction efforts. Some members of Congress sought a greatly expanded role
for the military in the drug campaign overseas, including aerial "hot pursuit" arrest
authority,67 but its authorities ultimately remained unchanged from the 1981
amendment to Posse Comitatus.
John E. Reilly, ed., American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy, 1987 (Chicago: Chicago
Council on Foreign Relations, 1987), 9.
66 Ibid.,
37.
67 The Hunter-Robinson Amendment to this effect was defeated in the Senate.
65
That same year, President Reagan issued National Security Decision
Directive (NSDD) - 221 entitled Narcotics and National Security. The NSDD
declared that "the expanding scope of global narcotics trafficking has created a
situation which today... threatens the national security of the United States."6 8
Drugs were seen to be a national security threat primarily because of their
destabilizing effect on democratic allies, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.
The presidential directive ordered the Secretary of Defense to work with the
Attorney General and Secretary of State to "develop and implement any
necessary modifications to applicable statues... to enable US military forces to
support counter-narcotics efforts more activity, consistent with the maintenance
of force readiness and training." 69
Between fiscal year 1982 and fiscal year 1987, DoD spending on narcotics
interdiction support rose from $5 million to $405 million. 70 There was public and
political pressure over this timeframe to escalate the Defense Department's
involvement in counternarcotics activities even further. Military and civilian
defense leaders in the Pentagon resisted a leadership role for the mission,
however, preferring to support the State Department and Justice Department.71
Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger cautioned in a 1988
68
NSDD Number 221, Narcotics and National Security, April 8, 1986, 1.
Ibid., 3.
70 Charles A. Bowsher, "Federal Drug Abuse Control Policy and the Role of the Military in AntiDrug Efforts," (Washington: Government Printing Office, June 8, 1988), 9.
71 See, for example, David R. Bewley-Taylor, The United States
and International Drug Control,
1909-1997 (London: Pinter, 1999), 187 and Eva Betram, et. al., Drug War Politics: The Price of
Denial (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 158-159.
69
Washington Post opinion piece that he saw limited promise in expanding the
military's role:
Calling for the use of the government's full military resources to put a stop
to the drug trade makes for hot exciting rhetoric. But responding to those
calls would make for terrible national security policy, poor politics and
guaranteed failure in the campaign against drugs.
His successor, Frank Carlucci, argued along similar lines in testimony before
Congress that year.73
Nineteen-eighty-eight saw the creation of a lead responsibility for the US
military in counternarcotics. The 1989 National Defense Authorization Act
declared drugs a "clear and present threat to U.S. security" and named DoD as
the lead agency for aerial and maritime detection and monitoring of drugs
headed for the United States. The Act required the Defense Department to
integrate certain command, control, and technical intelligence assets to ensure
their dedication to drug interdiction and to fund state plans for using Army
National Guard soldiers and Air National Guard airmen to support law
enforcement agencies and community-based organizations. Congress directed
DoD to provide promptly to civilian agencies any intelligence information related
to the drug trade that it collected. This direction was followed by an August 1989
national security directive, in which President George H.W. Bush updated
Ronald Reagan's 1986 NSDD by directing a vast expansion in U.S. military
Caspar W. Weinberger, "Our Troops Shouldn't Be Drug Cops," Washington Post, May 22,
1988: C2.
73 Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, testimony before the Joint Hearing: Senate Committee on
Armed Services and the House Committee on Armed Services' Subcommittee on Investigations
and the Defense Policy Panel, 15 June 1988, 1.
7
counter narcotics aid to Andean nations and relaxing the rules of engagement for
these forces when serving in Andean countries.
4
Under President Bush, the resistance of senior Defense Department
civilians to the counterdrug mission eased somewhat. Defense Secretary
Cheney declared the new detection and interdiction mission "a high-priority
national security mission for the Pentagon." 75 Cheney assigned the interdiction
lead mission to all Combatant Commands, resulting in the creation of three joint
task forces to coordinate civilian and military efforts. With the passage of a
September 1988 amendment to Title 10, law enforcement agencies were
required to reimburse DoD for counternarcotics support, easing a significant
source of prior friction.76 By Fiscal Year 1991, the Defense Department was
spending about $1 billion annually on counternarcotics.77
Yet these changes in attitude, and very real improvements in coordination
and capability, did not create broad and sustained attention to the
counternarcotics mission by the U.S. military establishment. In Fiscal Year 2009,
the US Department of Defense still spent about $1 billion on counternarcotics, a
significant real decline from its 1991 high point.78 Most military officers continue
74 Michael Isakoff, "Drug Plan Allows Use Of Military: Classified Directive From Bush Loosens
Rules of Engagement," Washington Post, September 10, 1989: Al. National Security Directive
18, "International Counternarcotics Strategy," August 21, 1989, remains classified.
75 Bewley-Taylor, 191.
76 10 USC Chapter 18 Section 377. Amended September 29, 1988 in Public Law 100-456.
77 General Accounting Office, "Drug Control: Defense Spending for Counternarcotics Activities
for Fiscal Years 1989-1991," NSIAD 92-82 (Washington: GAO, April 1992), 3.
78 White House, National Drug Control Strategy -- FY 2009 Budget Summary (Washington: GPO,
February 2008), 19.
to view counternarcotics as largely a law enforcement mission. The inhospitable
nature of Andean geography for conventional US military capabilities convinced
many that the "war on drugs" was unwinnable, with a Vietnam-like potential to
drag the US into defeat.
And, indeed, at the time DoD was assigned a leadership role for
interdiction and monitoring, there was little evidence to support the value of such
stepped-up efforts. In testimony during congressional consideration of the 1989
National Defense Authorization Act, the Comptroller General told the Senate
Armed Services Committee that "although greater involvement by the military
would probably result in more drug seizures and arrests," drug supplies would
largely remain unchanged because of the ease with which smugglers could
develop alternative supply strategies. The Comptroller General also stated that
DoD efforts were generally not cost-effective, require significant investments in
air and maritime interdiction to return modest caches of smuggled drugs.79
It appears most likely that the increased role for the military from 19881992 reflected the public and political frustration with the failure of the war on
drugs that had fueled the increasing role for military forces throughout the 1980s.
In a speech to a US Air War College class in 1988, Senator Phil Gramm argued
that using the military for counternarcotics demonstrated to the nation the gravity
79
Bowsher, 10-11.
of the drug problem and the concern of political leadership over its resolution.8 0
Representative Jack Davis (R-IL) similarly declared, "When you have a war, who
do you call in? . .. You call the military." 81
Domestic WMD Consequence Management in the 1990s
In 1996, Congress assigned to the Department of Defense (DoD) the
responsibility for training metropolitan emergency personnel how to manage the
consequences of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) events.
The Army, uncomfortable with the domestic mission, hired contractors to
administer the program. In 1999, under an agreement reached with the Attorney
General, DoD transferred authority for the training program to the Department of
Justice.
Beginning in 1998, Congress also significantly expanded a small
National Guard effort to establish rapid response teams for domestic CBRN
management.
It did so despite resistance from DoD and negative readiness
reports on the teams by Congress's own General Accounting Office. In January
2001, the DoD Inspector General issued a report blasting the program for
inefficiencies that severely hampered the teams' ability to support domestic
authorities. Today, Congress continues to expand the number of these so-called
National Guard Civil Support Teams (CSTs). Slow to recognize its over-reliance
on military agents, voices in Congress finally began calling for the creation of a
Senator Phil Gramm, US Air War College Distinguished Lecture Series, Maxwell Air Force
Base, Alabama, November 2, 1988. Cited in Orama, footnote 25.
81 Quoted in Elliot Marshall, "A War on Drugs With Real Troops," Science 241 (July 1988): 13.
80
82Defense
Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act.
strong civilian agent at the federal level to manage all programs for domestic
consequence management. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,
the United States established a Department of Homeland Security to manage
this and other domestic preparedness, response, and recovery issues.
Nevertheless, there remains a strong sentiment for a leading military role in
managing the consequences of a devastating event on US soil.
In January 1999, then President William Clinton named chemical,
biological, and information warfare attacks as the greatest emerging threats to
national security and proclaimed it "highly likely" that a terrorist group will attempt
a CBRN incident in the United States in the next several years.8 3 The former
president's statements echoed a growing concern among some academics and
policy makers that at the end of the
2 0
th
Century, CBRN threats to the United
States were increasingly probable. The convergence of three significant trends
prompted this gloomy forecast. These were the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and the expertise and technology to develop them, the evolution of
terrorist tactics from discrete attacks to mass lethality, and the United States'
unparalleled military advantage and worldwide footprint.
During the early 1990s, there was no integrated framework to manage US
activities across the more than forty federal departments and agencies working
on some aspect of domestic terrorism.
83
In 1995, President Clinton codified
Judith Miller and William J. Broad, "Clinton Describes Terrorism Threat for 2 1st Century," New
York Times, 22 January, 1999: 1.
federal agencies' roles in responding to terrorist incidents in the United States
and abroad through Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)-39."
These
responsibilities were further delineated in PDD-62, signed in May 1998, which
more narrowly addressed federal plans for managing unconventional forms of
terrorism.85 In both documents, agency responsibilities were divided into those
pertaining to crisis response and those pertaining to consequence management.
Crisis response referred to the law enforcement activities that take place
before an actual release of materials. Crisis response might include render-safe
operations of a detected agent or device and the identification and neutralization
of perpetrators. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was identified as the
lead agency for crisis response within the United States, supported by
specialized teams throughout the interagency.
Consequence management
activities were defined as those that take place after an agent's release.
Consequence management entails identifying the source of illness or death,
treating victims, securing the contaminated area, protecting responders, and
decontaminating affected areas. At the time, the lead agency for domestic
consequence management was the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), also supported by interagency elements.86
President William Clinton, Presidential Decision Directive 39, "U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism,"
June 21, 1995.
85 White House Fact Sheet, "PDD 62," May 22, 1998. Accessed at
8
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd-62. htm.
The Department of State isthe lead agency for crisis response and consequence management
of CBRN acts against US interests abroad.
86
Congress handed the Department of Defense its first domestic CBRN
consequence management mission in 1996. On the heels of the bombing of the
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Aum Shinrikyo attack in
Tokyo, Congress assigned DoD responsibility for training local first responders in
the nation's 120 largest cities about the effects and response implications of
chemical and biological attacks.87
The "train the trainers" program was
administered under the direction of the Army's Chemical and Biological Defense
Command and was run by contractors with some Army reserve personnel
participation. In October 2000, the Justice Department took over the program. 8
Justice already administered several consequence management programs,
including a $73.5 million grants program that provides equipment to first
responders as well as a $10 million training program of its own.8 9 Prior to turning
the "train the trainers" program over to the Justice Department, DoD had reached
more than 22,500 first responders in more than 80 US cities. 90
The next major step for DoD in the domestic consequence management
arena was a 1997 National Guard Bureau initiative to establish CBRN rapid
response teams in the United States.
Responding to significant outside
pressure, most notably from Congress and the National Defense Panel, the
87
Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act
asCongress's recent push to create a terrorism council at the White House is due in part to
concerns that NDPO, housed in the Justice Department, cannot adequately coordinate efforts
throughout the interagency.
89 "President Clinton and Vice President Gore Safeguarding Americans from the Threat of
Terrorism," The White House at Work, 15 March 1999; General Accounting Office, Combating
Terrorism: Need to Eliminate Duplicate Federal Weapons of Mass Destruction Training, NSIAD-
00-64 (Washington: GAO, March 2000), 4.
90 Charles Cragin, Statement before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure,
Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Emergency Management, May 4, 2000, 3.
Secretary of Defense requested that the Guard form a "tiger team" to examine
how best to integrate Reserve Components into CBRN domestic response. In
1998, the team recommended that the Secretary of Defense establish a small
rapid response team in each US state and territory; Secretary Cohen decided
that the National Guard should establish ten such teams, one in each of FEMA's
geographic regions. 91 Congress legislated teams in 17 more states for FY2000
and five more in FY2001, for a total of 32 teams.92 Today, DoD is authorized 55
of these teams.93
Originally called Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection (RAID) teams,
these Civil Support Teams (CSTs) were given the mandate to 1) assess a
suspected CBRN event in support of a local incident commander, 2) advise
civilian responders regarding appropriate action, and 3) facilitate requests for
assistance to expedite the arrival of additional federal assets.94
To this day,
twenty-two full-time National Guard personnel staff each CST. Although an asset
of the state to which they belong, other states within their region can request the
assistance of a CST in the event of a crisis. Further, the federal government
could choose to federalize the National Guard for a CBRN event, with the CST
91 Charles Cragin, Statement before the House Committee on Government Reform,
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations, 23 June 1999.
The first states with CSTs were California, Washington, Texas, Colorado, Missouri, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Georgia, New York, and Massachusetts.
United States House of Representatives, Making Appropriations for the Department of Defense
for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2000, and for Other Purposes, House Report 106-371,
92
8 October 1999 and Sydney J. Freidberg, Jr., "Feds Prepare State, Local Governments for
Terrorist Attacks," GovExec.com., 15 March 2001. Accessed at
www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0301/03150/nj.htm.
9 Briefing by Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale attended by author at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, January 14, 2008.
94 The name change reflects a public relations campaign to limit civil libertarian concerns about
the teams. This issue is discussed further in the second section of the paper.
deploying as a federal asset.95 In such a case, local authorities would not need
to request its deployment and the governor's approval would not be required.
The CST's anticipated response time to an incident in their home state is
approximately four to six hours after notification.
DoD participation in the CBRN consequence management arena had
extremely strong support in the United States Congress.
In 1995, Senators
Nunn, Lugar, and Domenici chose the Defense Department to train local first
responders in managing CBRN incidents, despite opposition from the active
military. 96 In their hearings on the subject, the senators also supported the
development of a Department of Defense, and possibly National Guard, domestic
rapid response capability. This preference for a DoD role was manifest again in
Congress' 1998 and 2000 decisions to expand the number of CSTs, despite
DoD's stated preference to expand more slowly and the recommendation of a
congressionally-mandated General Accounting Office study to hold off on
establishing more teams until a thorough reassessment of their functions and
need was conducted.97
These voices of caution were echoed by the DoD
Inspector General's office, which noted the CSTs' inability to meet the rapid
readiness schedule set for them.
98
Recent amendments to the Presidential Selective Reserve Call-Up authority were made to
allow for this federal role.
96 Falkenrath,
162.
95
97
US General Accounting Office, Combating Terrorism: Use of National Guard Response Teams
in Unclear, GAO-NSIAD-99-110 (Washington: GAO, 1999), 3.
98 US Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, Management of National Guard
Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams, Audit Report No. D-2001-043, January 31,
2001.
There appear to have been four major drivers of congressional interest in
an expanded DoD role in domestic consequence management: DoD's chemical
and biological weapons expertise, its enormous budget and personnel capacity,
the public's positive view of the military, and the National Guard's interest in
expanding its own efforts in the mission area.
DoD's expertise in chemical and biological weapons defense was a major
determining factor for Senators Nunn and Lugar's selection of DoD as the
training provider for first responders. In March 1996, Senator Nunn commented,
"it seems to me that the United States military that knows more about this
[chemical and biological weapons] than certainly any institution or group of
people in the country has some responsibility for the next few years to share their
knowledge with other Federal agencies, and certainly also with the State and
locals...."99 His staff on the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which
held the crucial hearings on CBRN response capabilities following the 1995
terrorist incidents in Tokyo and Oklahoma, strongly supported leveraging DoD
capabilities for domestic response, noting that "there is no need to duplicate their
[DoD's] efforts or reinvent the wheel" and directly calling for funding for DoD to
train local first responders and to develop deployable chemical and biological
response assets for domestic crises.10 0 The Committee called witnesses to
9 Quoted in,Global Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Hearings before, the United
States Senate, Committee on Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,
Part 111,March 27, 1996, 18.
100 Ibid., 19, 35.
testify to the same.1 01 Conversely, extant Guard capabilities appeared to play
little role in later congressional decisions to expand the number of CSTs.
The relative advantages of funding high interest programs through the
DoD budget was a second major factor in explaining the Department's
participation in domestic consequence management. Key members of Congress
who viewed the domestic use of DoD assets as leveraging existing capabilities
stressed the resource efficiency of funding programs through DoD. 102 Congress
increased the defense budget over the president's request every year of the
Clinton and George H.W. Bush Administrations. In 1996, for example, Congress
had already committed to increasing the President's DoD FY1 997 budget request
by $20 billion, which surely assisted its ability to legislate the $52 million trainthe-trainers program within that budget. 10 3
Moreover, the failure of the civilian emergency response system,
particularly FEMA, to prepare adequately for potential CBRN crises and a
stronger trust in the US military appears to have contribution to DoD's
selection. 104
As a participant in the establishment of the train-the-trainers
program noted, Senators Nunn, Lugar, and Dominici "expressed greater
confidence in the Defense Department's ability to implement the program than
101 See, for example, Bill Richardson, P. Lamont Ewell, and Gary Marrs, Global Proliferation of
Weapons of Mass Destruction, 73, 85, and 93, respectively
102
103
Sen. Sam Nunn, Global Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, 18.
104
Global Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, 29.
Falkenrath, 162.
that of the civilian agencies." 105 There were no equalizing voices with jurisdiction
over civilian agencies that attempted to defend FEMA or rebut the senators'
statements.
A fourth significant factor was the National Guard's strong support for an
expansion of its CBRN consequence management role.
The Army National
Guard had difficulty adjusting to the end of the Cold War. It had been written out
of war plans, on the assumption that it would not be ready in time, given only
enough symbolic wartime responsibility to assuage its Congressional patrons,
and been threatened with personnel reductions.1 06 Its major nemesis in these
battles was the active Army it supported. The Active Component believed that
the weekend warriors in the Guard are unsuited to the decisive warfare they
planned and prepared to wage. The 1997 National Defense Panel described the
relationship between the two bluntly: "While the other services have continued to
increase the integration of their active and reserve forces, the Army has suffered
from a destructive disunity among its components, specifically between the active
Army and the National Guard."107
During the late 1990s, the National Guard was working hard to regain
much of its clout. Congress had created senior Guard and Reserve advisory
105
Falkenrath, 163. He attributes this confidence to DoD's greater expertise inchemical and
biological defense.
On Guard and Reserve reductions, see Department of Defense, Report of the Quadrennial
Defense Review (Washington: Department of Defense, May 1997), 30.
107 National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century, May
1997, 52.
positions in the Joint Staff to ensure their strong representation in analytic efforts
that might affect their future size and role, and homeland security was emerging
as a promising alternative use for the Guard in the event of a seemingly quiet
overseas operational environment.1 08
The Guard sought the consequence
management mission from the time of its 1997 "tiger team" report to Secretary of
Defense Cohen. It was a high profile mission for which the Guard could garner
substantial Congressional and public support. As the Guard Bureau's Posture
Statement astutely noted, "Homeland defense is emerging as a national priority.
It has entered the imagination of the public."109 Moreover, recruiting for such
domestic jobs from within the Guard proved extremely easy. 10
Distributive politics relating to the National Guard were also critical to the
Guard's selection for the CST mission. 1
DoD's initial decision to fund only ten
CSTs typically pit a dominant regional state against its nine lesser neighbors.
Members were surely expressing a genuine concern for the welfare of their
citizens in desiring CSTs in their states. Yet they were likely also interested in
Paul Stone, "Guard, Reserve Get New Role on Joint Staff," American Forces Press
Service,
31 November 1998; Maj. Gen. Roger C. Schultz, Director, Army National Guard, Statement
before the US House of Representatives, Armed Services Committee, 8 March 2000, 1-2; Gen.
Thomas Schwartz, Commander, US Forces Korea, Statement before the US Senate, Armed
Services Committee, 7 March 2000, 18.
109 National Guard Bureau, National Guard Posture Statement, Fiscal Year 2000, 20.
110 Maj. Gen. John Fenimore, Adjutant General, National Guard, 23 June 1999.
11 Consider the following exchange between Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR) and Gen. Dennis
Reimer, at the time the Army Chief of Staff: DICKEY: Are you familiar with the Pine Bluff
Arsenal? REIMER: I am not familiar with it from the standpoint of having visited there. I'm
familiar with it from the standpoint of knowing it exists. DICKEY: There's an unusual combination
of things that makes that a particularly good area, I think, for a counterterrorism center. . .I just
wonder.. .what is the best way for us to talk to you and for me to make a pitch about (OFF-MIKE)
up arsenal and that sort of thing? (United States House of Representatives, Appropriations
Committee, Defense Subcommittee, Hearing on Army FY 2000 Budget Overview, 17 March
1999).
108
the symbolism attached to bringing home such an "elite" unit and the more
practical advantage of securing twenty-two full-time Guard positions for their
state, particularly given how active many Guardsmen are in local and state
politics. The continuing creation of additional teams eight years after the first
was authorized is further evidence of the Congress's enthusiasm for these
teams.
The four factors delineated above-military expertise, budgetary plenty,
public confidence in the military and the impression of civilian ineptness, and the
lobbying of the National Guard-did not operate in a vacuum.
There were
several potential sources of resistance to a significant military role in domestic
CBRN consequence management. At least four countervailing pressures could
have deflected domestic CBRN mission assignment from the military. These
were the electoral attractiveness of direct grants to states and localities, other
federal agents lobbying for the mission, opposition from the White House or
within the Department of Defense, and the opposition of civil libertarians.
By early 2001, over fifty percent of total federal CBRN crisis and
consequence management funding was devoted to assisting states and
localities.
In its early stages, however, congressional action on CBRN
consequence management generally focused on potential federal government
solutions to the problem. In FY1998, funding for states and localities was only
thirty percent of total federal spending on CBRN response and management.m
Local first responders were the most vocal critics of the early priority given to
funding federal efforts in CBRN consequence management. Furthermore, these
first responders testified at virtually all congressional hearings on consequence
management and uniformly expressed the view that funding to localities ought to
be the primary outlet for federal resources used to address the problem.
13
Civilian decision makers not only preferred federal to state and local
solutions, they also preferred DoD to other federal agents. DoD spent more on
defense against weapons of mass destruction than any other federal agency in
FY2000. Indeed, only the Department of Energy spent anywhere near the $467
million that DoD did in this area. Much of that money went toward research and
development efforts (as it does for the Department of Energy) that aid battlefield
as well as domestic consequence management. Nevertheless, DoD's funding for
assistance to domestic first responders and its own special response units was
itself greater than that of any other single agency in FY
1999.114
This trend held
steady until the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
Unlike local first responders, alternative agents to DoD at the federal level
did not attempt to weigh in with Congress in the 1990s against the use of the
military. FEMA, the lead agency for domestic consequence management, had
Office of Management and Budget, Annual Report to Congress on Combating Terrorism, 18
May 2000. These figures do not appear to capture the costs of maintaining military personnel.
112
" HOLD FOR FN
114 OMB, 18 May 2000.
been cool to the idea of assuming primary responsibility for CBRN incidents.
One source of concern was that CBRN missions appeared to be outside of
FEMA's essential mission of natural disaster preparedness. Following its poor
handling of Hurricane Andrew disaster relief, a newly elected President Clinton
tasked FEMA Director James Witt with reforming the agency. Witt succeeded,
largely by focusing FEMA on its core natural disaster mission. A related source
of concern was budgetary. FEMA feared that responsibility for CBRN missions
would carry significant responsibility but that the money to carry it out would not
follow. "The result," opined Richard Falkenrath, "would be a severe drain on
FEMA's limited discretionary resources and, in all likelihood, public criticism for
ineffective implementation."015 Despite these misgivings, Vice President Cheney
announced in mid-2001 that FEMA would indeed assume primary responsibility
for coordinating federal, state, and local CBRN consequence management
efforts. 1' 6 It is unclear the extent to which FEMA sought such an expansion of its
role.
For its part, DoD leadership never sought its domestic consequence
management role, and was at best lukewarm to its involvement.
Defense
leaders' statements on the topic are indicative of an attempt to balance the desire
to remain relevant to emerging national security missions with the need for
restraint toward the use of military capabilities. The public comments of then
Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, the most vocal executive branch
115
116
Falkenrath, 163.
Ian Christopher McCaleb, "Disaster Agency to Coordinate Terrorism Response," CNN.com, 8
May 2001.
spokesperson on the topic at the time, are emblematic. He referred to homeland
defense as "the defense mission of the next century" and "an important and
honorable mission."1 17 At the same time, he also led the charge to soften the
Department's terminology, renaming "homeland defense" as "civil support" and
transforming the National Guard "RAID" teams into the less offensive "CSTs."
Hamre's emphasis that "we in DoD will always be-and never seek any other
role than to be-a supporting role to local law enforcement and to local first
responders" was subsequently reiterated in virtually every public statement by
DoD officials on the topic, particularly before Congress."
8
The proliferation of
homeland security "coordinators" within DoD, by far the most common selfinitiated response to the domestic consequence management mission at the
time, seems a manifestation of this centerline approach.
The greatest
Pentagon
opposition to
a domestic
consequence
management role came from the Active Army, which remains the greatest
internal opponent to this day.
When it was assigned the train-the-trainers
program in 1996, the Army hired contractors to administer the program and
happily transferred it to the Justice Department several years later. Notably,
however, the Army objected only to the use of active duty forces for domestic
purposes; it was quite open to the idea of using reserve and, especially, National
Guard personnel in these missions. For the Active Army, the further commitment
Quoted in Jonathan S. Landay, "Launching a 'Homeland' Defense," The Christian Science
Monitor, 29 January 1999: 1; former Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre, remarks to the
American Bar Association, 29 April 1999.
118 Hamre, 29 April 1999.
117
of the Guard to its domestic role eased the political pressure to create National
Guard warfighting missions.119 More to the point, it reduces the amount of time
and resources the Active Army must spend on domestic consequence
management. Congress's expansion of the Guard's role in CBRN consequence
management, such as through the CSTs, may therefore have been a happy
solution to both Active and Guard desires.
On the far left and right of the American political spectrum, Congress
faced opposition to a significant military role at home.12 0 The American Civil
Liberties Union reacted with alarm to the initial assignment of the train-thetrainers program to the Pentagon and even more so to the CSTs, arguing that
both
blurred the
military-civilian
line,
particularly in the area
of law
enforcement.121 These objections were made in the best tradition of American
liberalism, but there was no groundswell of public opposition to the use of military
units in response to natural and man-made catastrophes within the United
States. As one military law expert assured at the time, "the record indicates that
legal niceties or strict construction of prohibited conduct will be a minor concern. .
. . Pragmatism appears to prevail when American soldiers help their fellow
This particular Active-Reserve dynamic has changed significantly since the protracted ground
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have required the Army to rely substantially on the
National Guard to serve in an operational role overseas.
120 See Landay, 2.
121 William Broad and Judith Miller, "Pentagon Seeks Command for Emergencies in the US,"
New York Times, 28 January 1999; Bradley Graham, "Pentagon Plans Domestic Anti-Terrorism
Team," Washington Post, 1 February 1999; and Jim Landers, "US Quietly Upgrading Homeland
Defense Plan," Dallas Morning News, 9 February 1999. Cited in Amy E. Smithson and Leslie119
Anne Levy, Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response, Report
No. 35 (Washington: Henry L. Stimson Center, 1999), 133.
citizens."1 22 Further, Congress stressed the consequence management aspect
of DoD's potential mission, downplaying any potential law enforcement role.
Importantly, there appeared to be no significant organized pressure
groups weighing in on the train-the-trainers issue. Witnesses called to testify
were either local first responders, eager for a training program that would allow
them to gain expertise, or proponents of capitalizing on DoD capabilities. There
were no witnesses called who opposed use of the DoD in this manner. No
military or civilian DoD witnesses were asked to comment on the advisability of
assigning the program to the military during the original Senate Government
Operations Committee hearings, although several testified on DoD's capabilities
in chemical and biological agent detection and response. FEMA did not wish to
assume the duties involved. Further, only after Congress assigned the train-thetrainers program to DoD did the ACLU begin to take notice of the program, which
ultimately affected the extent to which Department leadership sought to distance
itself from a lead response role.
The Active Army did indeed have significant expertise in chemical and
biological agents-expertise that should have been tapped in any program
Congress established. What it did not have was experience working within the
emergency management, domestic counterterrorism, public health, or law
enforcement systems. The Army also had little interest in expending personnel
Thomas R. Lujan, "Legal Aspects of Domestic Employment of the Army," Parameters 27
(Autumn 1997): 83.
1
and resources on a program that was not clearly in line with their own sense of
mission. Finally, the active Army was leery of the implications of training local
law enforcement officials on a massive, well-publicized scale. That the Army did
not want the mission, passed it off to contractors (who were by and large retired
military chemical weapons officers), and ultimately had the program transferred,
may indicate that Congress assigned greater importance to the symbol of initial
action in this case than in monitoring the administrative feasibility or success of
the program once underway. The train-the-trainers program would likely have
been better administered from the beginning by the Justice Department or
FEMA, both of which were well integrated with state and local systems, drawing
on DoD chemical and biological defense expertise where appropriate.
In the case of the National Guard Civil Support Teams, there was indeed a
strong lobby from the National Guard to secure the mission. At the same time,
the evidence indicates a highly receptive Congress, possibly to avoid any blame
for inaction.
One Washington think tank succinctly stated at the time, "When
elected officials eager to authorize a program to show they are "doing something"
concrete about a problem collide with an organization in search of missions,
something like the National Guard's Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection
(RAID) teams results."023
Choosing Civilians
123
Smithson and Levy, 294.
America's political leaders do not always choose the military to oversee
new or newly important missions.
As Chapter 3 illustrates, in the limited
universe of conscious military-civilian selection, civilian agents are sometimes
preferred. This fact seems intuitively consistent with the nature of the American
political system and its suspicions of a standing military. Political science and
popular literature nevertheless fails to note, discuss, or debate this reality. The
choice to establish NASA as an independent, civilian agency is one such key
decision. The on-again, off-again desire to ensure civilian oversight of foreign
police training is another.
Establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
In 1957, the Soviet Union became the first nation in space with the launch
of its Sputnik rocket, followed closely by the launch of a larger, more powerful
Sputnik 2. The anger and embarrassment within the United States over the
Soviet success was substantial. This embarrassment was exacerbated when the
Navy's Vanguard rocket, equipped with a satellite, exploded soon after liftoff.
The success of Sputnik 2 and the Navy's Vanguard failure led directly to a
pressing discussion of US space missions and attendant organizational
approaches in the scientific and military communities.
On April 2, 1958,
President Eisenhower announced his intention to establish a unified national
space agency.
The resulting 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act
established NASA as an independent, civilian agency to spearhead the nation's
space science agenda. By 1960, portions of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency,
Naval Ordinance Laboratory, and Naval Research Laboratory were transferred
from the Department of Defense to NASA, contributing to a near tripling of
NASA's original manning.124
The
NASA's birth as a civilian agency was hardly predestined.
Department of Defense had numerous space-related programs underway,
particularly in the areas of reconnaissance and rocketry. Elements within the
Army and Air Force, as well as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, were in
favor of organizing the national space effort under military leadership,
ss
had
occurred in the Manhattan Project. These elements believed that the most
important applications of space lay in the military realm, particularly
reconnaissance. They lacked strong support from the secretary of defense, the
president, and the scientific community, however. The Secretary of Defense
concurred with the White House's draft legislation for NASA's creation125 and
was generally content with the retention of only military-specific programs under
DoD purview. 126
Sylvia K. Kraemer, "Organizing for Exploration," in John M. Logsden, ed., Exploring the
Unknown, Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume I:
Organizing for Exploration (Washington: NASA History Office, 1995), 611.
125 Letter, Maurice Stans to President Eisenhower regarding H.R. 12575, the National
Aeronautics and Space Act, July 26, 1958. White House Office: Records Officer Reports to
President on Pending Legislation, Box 124, 7/29/58 HR 12575.
126 Robert J.Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956-1960, History of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, Volume IV (Washington: Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, 1997),
199.
124
President Eisenhower strongly favored a civilian space agency, believing
that the space program should have peaceful goals and be seen as such by the
international community. 12 7 These views were not informed so much by altruism
as by the president's strong desire to ensure US means for early warning.
Eisenhower was greatly influenced by his desire to avoid strategic surprises like
that presented by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. By arguing for "open skies" and
the peaceful exploration of space, the United States could protect its ability to
deploy high altitude reconnaissance assets, such as the U-2, over Soviet
territory. A NASA historian argues that, far from being concerned by the Sputnik
I launch, President Eisenhower saw it as an opportunity:
"Four days after Sputnik I, in fact, Eisenhower and Deputy Secretary of
Defense Donald Quarles discussed the issue. Quarles observed: '. . . the
Russians have . . . done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the
concept of freedom of international space.' . . . The President then looked
ahead . . . and asked about a reconnaissance [satellite] vehicle."1 2 8
When civilian satellites subsequently traversed the world's airspace in 1958,
neither the Soviets nor any other nation voiced objections, seeming to confirm
the wisdom of the president's peaceful "open skies" approach.
There were other reasons to disincline Eisenhower from selecting the
Department of Defense for the space mission. He distrusted its inter-service
rivalries and worried over the potential self-perpetuating nature of the defense
127
128
James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 122.
R. Cargill Hall, "Origins of U.S. Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of
Space," in Logsden, 228.
industrial complex. 12 9 He also knew that the military's satellite programs were
more costly and complex than their civilian counterparts, and thus unlikely to
yield near term reconnaissance capability.130 Finally, the National Academies of
Science had argued to him in October 1957 that the Department of Defense
faced statutory limits on its ability to oversee some of the key benefits of space
exploration-meteorology, navigation, and communications.13 1
The scientific community was largely supportive of civilian leadership in
the space arena. The views of James Killian, President of MIT and chief science
advisor to the president, are thought by most scholars to have been formative in
shaping Eisenhower's viewpoint. Killian believed the new agency should be built
around the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a small civilian
research agency established by Congress in 1915 in the midst of World War I to
help the United States catch-up to German progress in long-range bombing and
reconnaissance. H. Guyferd Steyer, chair of the Special Committee on Space
Technology at the time of NASA's founding, recalls that the NACA choice was
not an obvious bureaucratic choice:
NACA had no strong allies in the fierce battle that was under way. Few of
its funds went to private contractors, in contrast to the heavy private
investments by the military. It had a limited role in aeronautical research,
See, for example, Eisenhower's Farewell Address, January 17, 1961, which warns against
the establishment of a military-industrial complex.
129
13
131
Hall, 228.
Interview with Eilene Galloway, Legislative Research Service, in Legislative Origins of the
National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop
Conducted April 3, 1992, NASA History Division, July 1998, Monographs in Aerospace History,
No. 8, 32.
although within that it did some effective things, particularly building and
operating wind tunnels. But it was seen by some as unimaginative and
narrow in its vision. Fairly or not, Theodore von Karman labeled it
"skeptical, conservative, and reticent."' 32
Killian's preference for building NASA around NACA echoed the president's
desire to have US exploration of space be viewed in the most peaceful and
unthreatening of contexts. Some proponents of a civilian approach to space
preferred to center NASA around the Atomic Energy Commission, which had
some rocketry expertise. Senator Clinton Andersen, chair of the AEC's oversight
committee, was the key supporter of this approach. Eisenhower dismissed the
idea with little discussion. Killian had support from the Bureau of the Budget to
center the new agency around NACA.
The precursor to today's Office of
Management and Budget, the Bureau of the Budget was charged by President
Eisenhower with drafting the NASA legislation, making its support of a NACAcentered option critical. Its support grew from its respect for the low-key, efficient
nature of NACA, which operated on a shoestring relative to the Department of
Defense.
Senator Lyndon Johnson, Congress' most outspoken and powerful
politician on space issues, largely agreed with Eisenhower on the need for
civilian leadership in space, despite his public statements that there were
1 H. Guyford Stever, In War and Peace (Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), 137. Stever's
commission was created to defend NACA to critics and to position it well in the midst of
deliberations on a new space agency.
significant military implications to space exploration.
3
For all of his heated post-
Sputnik rhetoric, however, Johnson's investment in the organization of US space
capability was questionable. His Senate aide and future press secretary, George
Reedy, noted that Johnson "could see the [missile] issue only in terms of
newspaper space and public attention... .Therefore, as column inches devoted to
outer space dwindled and as polls registered a diminution of popular interest, he
virtually abandoned the entire project."1 34 Johnson allowed the Republican White
House to draft its own legislative proposal for NASA, proposing only two
amendments to it on the Senate floor to ensure coordination between NASA and
the military and with the White House. On the other hand, the selection of a
civilian agency created for him a committee chairmanship, that of the new Senate
Committee on Space and Aeronautics, an outcome that would not have occurred
had the space agency been military.
Training Foreign Police Forces
Responsibility for training foreign police is a particularly interesting case of
agency selection. As with civil defense, discussed in the next chapter, its
assignment has moved at certain times from one agency to another. Yet despite
the significant role that the US military has at times come to play in foreign police
training, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, since the 1950s formal responsibility
for policing has always remained in civilian hands.
133
Homer E. Newall, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (Washington:
NASA History Office, 1980), 96.
134 Quoted in Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New
York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 1029.
The United States has a long and contentious history of supporting the
development of criminal justice systems, including police, in foreign nations.
Following US military governance in Japan and Germany, President Eisenhower
created the Civil Police Administration to provide foreign policing assistance. It
was housed within the International Cooperation Administration, a precursor to
the US Agency for International Development. The Civil Police Administration
aimed to teach such traditional police capabilities as "administration, records, and
traffic control" to emerging democracies overseas.135 The Central Intelligence
Agency and Department of Defense also had programs aimed at improving
foreign internal defense, some of which involved the training of police overseas.
By the 1960s, concern about communist movements abroad drove
interest in strengthening foreign police as a key counterinsurgency tool.
President Kennedy asked US Agency for International Development Director
Hamilton Fowler, who had inherited the Civil Police Administration into his newly
created agency, for his recommendation on how to centralize CIA, Defense
Department, Treasury, FBI, and Civil Police Administration activities. At the
same time, the State Department asked representatives of an ad hoc
Interagency Committee for Police Assistance for their views on the future of US
foreign police training. The recommendations of this committee and Fowler
ultimately shaped President Kennedy's decision to house leadership for this
mission in the US Agency for International Development.
Thomas Lobe, "The Rise and Demise of the Office of Public Safety," Armed Forces and
Society. 9 (Winter 1983): 188.
135
Ironically, AID Director Fowler did not actually fight for or want the
international policing mission:
AID Director Fowler believed that a police program had no place in an
organization whose mission was to provide economic and technical
assistance in such areas as agriculture, public health, and education. He
had intended to abolish the small Civil Police Administration program
entirely, due to its being peripheral to, if not contrary to, AID principles.
Many economists in AID were hostile to the continued inclusion of
"redneck cops and spooks" in an organization supposedly involved with
economic growth. 136
Yet the only agency demonstrating an interest in coordinating the various
interagency international policing efforts was the Department of Defense, a
solution no other agency supported. There was a general concern among
civilian agencies about the need to distinguish civilian policing from the
counterinsurgency mission set, with which it overlapped but of which it was not a
subsidiary. Some also feared that the Pentagon would not pay sufficient
attention to civilian police activities given its core focus on conventional and
nuclear warfare.137 One historian quotes future Vietnam civil operations and
revolutionary development support (CORDS) Director Robert Komer as stating,
"We don't want a bunch of colonels running programs in which they have no
expertise."1 38 US AID was thus recommended to President Kennedy by both
Fowler and a majority of the State Department-led Interagency Committee.
Building institutions of justice, such as the police, was completely consistent with
the other state institution building overseen by AID. To prevent the policing
Ibid., 189.
Ibid., 189.
Quoted inWilliam Rosenau, "Low-Cost Trigger-Pullers: The Politics of Policing in the Context
of Contemporary 'State-Building' and Counterinsurgency," RAND Working Paper, WR-620USCA, October 2008.
136
137
138
mission from being marginalized within the indifferent-to-hostile USAID
bureaucracy, however, it was given its own authorities for hiring and a separate
budget. Kennedy named the new organization, established in 1962, The Office
of Public Safety (OPS).
Mandated to train foreign police of the non-Communist world, particularly
in countering communist subversion or possible insurgency, OPS provided over
$300 million of assistance to police in 52 countries before it shut its doors in
1974. One of the most enduring legacies of OPS was the Washington, DCbased International Police Training Academy, opened in 1963, where tens of
thousands of foreign police received training.139
In 1974, Congress severely restricted the use of US AID funds for police
assistance, effectively eliminating OPS. OPS's demise was perhaps inevitable,
given its baptism by fire in, and association with, Vietnam. OPS was at once
largely sidelined inVietnam and tainted by it. Charged with training a highly
corrupt South Vietnamese police force, OPS failed to deliver a rule of law force
trusted by the population. Revelations that a Vietnamese prison under OPS
auspices housed tiger cages, and that OPS knew of this, were particularly
damaging.140 One analyst assesses that OPS's "personnel base, budgetary
Walter C. Ladwig, Ill, "Training Foreign Police: A Missing Aspect of US Security Assistance to
Counterinsurgency," Comparative Strategy 26 (2007): 288.
140 See, for example, Gloria Emerson, "Americans Find Brutality in South Vietnamese
Prison,"
The New York Times, July 7, 1970, 31.
139
levels, primary mission, and self-confidence were either distorted or destroyed"
by Vietnam.
141
OPS did not fare well with the Congress and public elsewhere in the
world, either. Despite Kennedy's placement of OPS in USAID to establish its
institution-building roots, many believed the organization's mission was to
support repression of leftist movements abroad. From its inception, critics
suspected OPS had a close relationship with the CIA, which indeed used the
organization as a cover for covert training of foreign police. 14 2 The low stature of
police in many countries, combined with rampant corruption of security
institutions, made lasting reform difficult to ensure. Media reports of police
brutality in the third world, and Latin America in particular, were linked in the
popular press to the training these forces received at OPS's International Police
Training Academy. By the mid-1970s, the credibility costs associated with
operating overt police training programs no longer appeared. In a 1974
Washington Post letter to the editor, Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota
averred:
The International Police Training Academy here in Washington.. .just
graduated another class of students who will return to Uruguay,
Guatemala, Nigeria, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines to continue
the "stability" of the dictatorships and support of activities of which we are
"officially unaware." 143
141
Lobe, 194.
1
Confirmation of CIA-OPS collaboration on a daily basis in training foreign police can be found
in the so-called Family Jewels documents released by the CIA in 2007. See
http://www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family jewels full ocr.pdf, 607-613.
14 James Abourezk, Senator from South Dakota, "Tax Dollars for Torture," The Washington Post,
June 28, 1974, 18.
That same year, Abourezk sponsored the Foreign Assistance Act amendment
that prohibited US training of foreign police except in limited circumstances.
These restrictions were codified in Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act.
Exempted by this provision were counternarcotics efforts conducted by the FBI
and DEA, maritime law enforcement training, and training relating to Eastern
Caribbean regional security efforts.
The creation of OPS was not to be the last instance of agent selection for
foreign police training, however. The United States government largely stayed
out of policing training through the end of the Cold War. A major exception was
in support of counternarcotics. Congress amended the Foreign Assistance Act in
1985 to allow some police training in Honduras and El Salvador and also to lift
the 1974 restrictions for countries with long-standing democratic traditions, such
as inWestern Europe. Following these amendments, the Reagan Administration
established a new organization to coordinate overseas police training, this time
housed inthe Department of Justice.
US AID had resisted being drawn back into police assistance, as had the
FBI. 144 In 1986, the Administration therefore created an independent
International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP)
reporting directly to the Deputy Attorney General and funded with development
dollars from AID channeled through the State Department. ICITAP's focus was
initially the bolstering of criminal justice capacity in Honduras and El Salvador. In
Charles T. Call, "Institutional Learning within ICITAP," in Robert B. Oakley, Michael J.
Dziedzic, and Eliot M. Goldberg, eds., Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and
Public Security (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1998), 321.
144
the ensuring five years, as Congress became more confident that the mistakes of
the OPS era would not be repeated, ICITAP's mandate slowly expanded to
encompass much of what OPS had been chartered to undertake, including direct
training of police in arrests and criminal investigation. Although continuing to
focus on police training for counternarcotics, by Fiscal Year 1991, such training
was taking place in over 100 countries through programs administered by the
Defense Department, State Department, and ICITAP. 1 45
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of various
peacekeeping and counternarcotics operations in the 1990s, the need for a
comprehensive US government approach to foreign police training again took on
the prominence it held in the early 1960s. ICITAP's experience in Panama
marked the beginning of an era in which the US government sought once again
the "restructuring of the entire law enforcement apparatus of countries in
transition."1 46 In 1996, following US experiences in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, and
in the midst of operations in Bosnia, the Foreign Assistance Act was again
amended to allow for aid to "reconstitute civilian police authority and capability in
the post-conflict restoration of host nation infrastructure for the purposes of
supporting a nation emerging from instability, and the provision of professional
public safety training, to include training in internationally re cognized standards
of human rights... .147
145
General Accounting Office, Foreign Aid: Police Training and Assistance, GAO/NSIAD-92-118
GAO, March 6, 1992), 2-3.
(Washington:
46
Call, 316.
147 Public Law 87-195, The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as Amended, Section 660 (6).
ICITAP's success in the interventions of the 1990s varied. In Somalia,
ICITAP was withdrawn quickly, with little opportunity to improve policing. In Haiti,
where the US Government exercised far better political-military planning prior to
intervention in general, ICITAP played a key role and had significant near-term
success. In Bosnia, however, ICITAP's limited capacity and the confusion of
interagency roles and missions, particularly between civilian and military,
impaired US effectiveness and demonstrated the enduring institutional gap that
OPS and ICITAP were intended to fill.
The relative roles of military and civilian agencies were at the heart of the
debate over how to resolve security sector reform, including policing. In all of the
1990s interventions, initial US military force was needed to provide the level of
security required to restore order. As one analyst lamented of ICITAP, "It is not
configured to deploy massive numbers of personnel as a short-term international
police monitoring force. As a result, other forces... must be relied upon" in the
early stages of intervention. 14 8 These "other forces" were frequently US military.
In 1995, the congressionally mandated Commission on the Roles and
Missions of the Armed Forces (CORM) released its report on restructuring
Department of Defense activities. Among its recommendations, the CORM
advocated that the Defense Department train host-nation police on techniques to
maintain civil order in the wake of a U.S. military operation. It provided the
following rationale:
148
Call, 357.
We expect DOD will continue to be called upon to carry out law
enforcement operations in the future. Our recent experience in Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Africa shows that there are no civilian
agencies capable of short-notice law enforcement operations and training
in hostile, demanding environments. By default, these missions... fall to
the Military.1 4 9
The CORM specifically recommended the lifting of restrictions under Section 660
of the Foreign Assistance Act to the use of US military forces in police training
and the organizing, training, and equipping of US military forces to perform the
mission.150
The Department of Defense that had expressed some interest in
coordinating policing missions during the Kennedy Administration, however, had
long since abandoned its desire by the 1990s. The specter of repeating the US
military's experience in Vietnam, contrasted with the desire to focus on
expeditionary combat operations that succeeded in Desert Storm, had instilled in
military leadership an aversion to peace operations and the nation-building tasks
that often accompanied them. During the 1995 US intervention in Haiti,
contemporaneous with publication of the CORM report, a poll sampling 2000
personnel deployed to that country found that 49% believed the mission to be
unimportant to the United States.151 Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General John Shalikashvili, objected quickly and strenuously to suggestions that
the US military be used in training or acting as so-called constabulary forces.
This issue came to a head that same year when U.S. military personnel
149
The Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces, Directions for Defense
fWashington: GPO, May 24, 1995), 2-18.
so Ibid.
Ronald R. Halverson and Paul D. Bliese, "Determinants of Soldier Support for Uphold
Democracy," Armed Forces and Society 23 (Fall 1996), 84.
151
participating in Haiti operations were photographed failing to intervene while a
Haitian national was attacked.
Despite the negative press and congressional pressure, the Chairman,
backed by Secretary of Defense Perry, stood firm in his position that US military
personnel would not be involved in law and order. 152 Although the rules of
engagement for US military personnel were relaxed to allow them more latitude
in intervening to restore law and order, the military did not absorb the policing
mission. Instead, the international community ultimately sent civilian police
officers-including some from the United States-to maintain order and train
Haitian police. The same civilian training mechanism was used in Bosnia.
By the end of the Clinton Administration, the need for a capable and
cohesive approach to foreign police training was as prominent a discussion in
intellectual and governmental circles as it had been in the early 1960s. Whereas
concern in the earlier era was over the need to quash communist insurgents, and
later narcotics networks, the 1990s debate focused on the requirements of
institution building in weak democracies. The culmination of growing concern
was a Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) on Strengthening Criminal Justice
Systems in Support of Peace Operations (PDD-71), issued by President Clinton
in February 2000. Reflecting yet another shift in mission assignment, the
President assigned lead responsibility for all policy and operational oversight of
152
Call, 343.
criminal justice development to the Department of State.153 State's Bureau for
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) assumed the
requirement to coordinate State, Defense, and Justice Department efforts to
improve civilian policing overseas. The issue of agent assignment appeared
closed once again.
PDD-71 was signed less than a year before the Clinton Administration's
end. Inthe remaining months, its tenets were not institutionalized. The Bush
Administration did not rescind PDD-71, but from its first days in 2001, the
Administration made clear its intention not to engage in nation-building. During
the 2000 presidential debates, candidate Bush previewed his approach when
asked whether the United States should develop deployable civilian capacity for
post-conflict nation building:
I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in
the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something
here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from
America? Absolutely not.1 54
Civilian capacity building and coordination of policing functions atrophied after
the issuance of PDD-71. The next opportunity to review US policy came with the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
The 2001 Bonn Agreement that established the interim Afghan
government accorded with candidate Bush's preference that "nation building"
At this point in time, the US Agency for International Development had lost its cabinet status
and was an independent agency reporting to the Secretary of State.
154 Transcript of the Second Gore-Bush Presidential Debate, Commission on Presidential
Debates, October 11, 2000, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
153
would ultimately be the responsibility of the Afghanis. In April 2002, following the
removal of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, international donors met in
Geneva to define roles and responsibilities for transition to Afghan authority. At
the conference, Germany agreed to lead efforts to rebuild the Afghan National
Police. Germany had a long history of training Afghans: Germans had trained
Afghans prior to World War II, West Germany had trained the police prior to the
Russian invasion, and East Germans had trained them during the Soviet
occupation. Afghans were thus very comfortable with the prospect of German
assistance in the wake of the NATO-led invasion. Germany focused on building
an Afghanistan National Police Academy in Kabul, providing approximately forty
police advisors. It provided one advisor to the Interior Ministry, which would need
to function effectively if the police were to perform their duties. 155
Germany's leadership of Afghan policing was thus backed by modest
means. The bulk of monetary, personnel, and infrastructure assistance to the
Afghan police actually came, and continues to come, from the United States. It
was slow to arrive, however. At the Geneva Conference, the United States had
volunteered to lead military training. For several years, it did little in the area of
policing. Instead, State INL focused on providing personal security for Afghan
leaders such as President Hamid Karzai. It delivered this security in the form of
contract personnel from Dyncorp, a private security firm.
155
Department of Defense and Department of State Inspectors General, Interagency Assessment
of Afghanistan Police Training and Readiness, DOS Report No. ISP-IQO-07-07 and DoD Report
No. IE-2007-01, November 2006, 3.
The failure of the Afghan police to provide for basic law enforcement
caused the Bush Administration to intercede and shift significant responsibility for
the policing mission to military commanders on the ground. In accordance with
PDD-71, policy oversight of US policing assistance was provided by the US
Ambassador, with support from INL personnel at the embassy in Kabul.
Nevertheless, day-to-day oversight and direction was turned over to the US
military-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A).
CSTC-A continues to leverage INL's Dyncorp contract, using private trainers to
supplement American military trainers both in numbers and policing expertise. It
also embeds an INL employee at the Command. Success has not immediately
followed this de facto, though not de jure, shift to military agency.
By 2005, the total cost of US police training efforts in Afghanistan was
more than $1 billion, which included only 377 Dyncorp police advisors, far fewer
trainers than many experts believed were needed. The quality of some trainers,
particularly for the Ministry of Interior, was also questioned by some. In fact, a
late 2006 study by the Inspectors General of the State and Defense Departments
determined that Afghan police were largely failing in routine law enforcement
responsibilities. 156 The training programs made some notable improvements by
2009, but the Afghan police continue to lag behind the military in their readiness.
156
Ibid.; James Glanz and David Rohde, "Report Faults Training Of Afghan Police," The New
York Times, December 4, 1996, 1.
Although the US invasion of Afghanistan preceded its Operation Iraqi
Freedom by several years, it was actually in Iraq that the US military first took an
unofficial leadership role in foreign police training, a mission it had not performed
since its military governance days in Germany and Japan. From 2003 to 2004,
the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) oversaw Iraqi transition programs for
the United States and its coalition partners. The CPA worked with the
Departments of State and Justice, as well as with international partners, to
provide civilian police advisors-largely contract personnel-for Iraq. In fact,
State INL developed the initial training program for Iraqi police.157 From the
beginning of US operations, however, responsibility for training the police
essentially resided with the US-led coalition military forces in Iraq. This
arrangement was codified when the CPA stood down in June 2004. President
Bush's National Security Presidential Directive 36, which assigned US transition
and reconstruction roles and responsibilities in support of the new Iraqi
government, stated:
Commander, USCENTCOM, with the policy guidance of the Chief of
Mission, shall direct all United States Government efforts and coordinate
international efforts in support of organizing, equipping, and training all
Iraqi security forces. At the appropriate time, the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Defense shall jointly decide when these functions shall
transfer to a security assistance organization and other appropriate
organizations under the authority of the Secretary of State and the Chief of
Mission. ...58
Inspectors General of the US Department of State and US Department of Defense,
Interagency Assessment of Iraq Police Training, Department of State Report No. ISP-IQO-05-72
and Department of Defense Report No. IE-2005-002, July 15, 2005, 1.
158 Ibid.,
1.
157
As of this writing, the Defense Department retains oversight of US police
assistance to Iraq, subject, as in Afghanistan, to the policy direction of the
Ambassador. In addition to police academies and regional training centers and
support to the Ministry of Interior, over 200 Police Transition Teams are spread
across the country to mentor the Iraqi Police Service. The transition teams are
led by a military officer; an international civilian police advisor serves as the
deputy on each team. Progress in training Iraqi police has been substantially
better than in Afghanistan, largely owing to the relative concentration of US
military forces in Iraq to date. Nevertheless, as in Afghanistan, the quality and
number of trained Iraqi police lags that of its military.
In 2007, the congressionally-mandated Independent Commission on the
Security Forces of Iraq, also known as the Jones Commission for its chairman,
General James Jones (ret.) recommended the transfer of police training to the
Department of Justice. The Commission argued that day-to-day military authority
for policing programs "has inadvertently marginalized civilian police advisors and
limited the overall effectiveness of the training and advisory effort."159 The Jones
Commission pointed to the same fears expressed by some analysts since the
1960s: that military oversight was emphasizing counterinsurgency over basic
law enforcement, and thus undermining population support. Moreover, the
Genera James L. Jones, USMC (Ret.), et. al., The Report of the Independent Commission on
the Security Forces of/raq (Washington: CSIS Press, September 6, 2007), 99.
159
Commission found rapid turnover and minimal policing background inthe military
leadership charged with the training mission. 60
The tenuous security situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan goes far in
explaining the reliance on military forces to oversee police training activities, just
as it explains the reliance on, though not necessarily leadership of, military forces
for other aspects of institution building in these two countries. For now, the
conduct of these operations also overshadows the broader but less time-urgent
problem of fulfilling the intent of PDD-71: to provide coordinated direction and
US government capacity for civilian police training. Following the stabilization
and/or substantial drawdown of US forces from these two operational theaters,
questions about how to organize for civilian police assistance may thus once
again rise to the forefront, just as they did in post-conflict environments of the
early 1960s, mid-1970s, and late 1990s. The next milestone in the history of
foreign police training mission assignment may be its last-with a clear lead
agent selection and capability and capacity institutionalized. If past is prologue,
however, there may be many more transitions in responsibility for this national
security mission. Even today, the mission's institutional home is unclear and its
future in question.
160
Ibid., 81-82.
5. SHIFTING AGENTS: THE HISTORY OF CIVIL DEFENSE
The cases presented in Chapter 4 offer insight into how agent selection
was made for several emerging national security missions. In this chapter, I will
trace the agent selection process as it changed over forty years in the area of
civil defense. The civil defense case appears unique in its representation of a
transition first from civilian to military leadership and later back to civilian control.
Tracing these changes in its agency illuminates the effects of geostrategic and
public confidence factors in affecting mission assignment.
Civil Defense in the Cold War
Five days after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy chaired
a meeting of his national security council (NSC) to cope with the policy
ramifications of the operation. In addition to discussing changes to U.S. policy
toward Cuba, the NSC decided to order a review of the overall U.S. approach
toward worldwide communism. As part of this review, the NSC tasked a small
sub-group, headed by NSC aide Carl Kaysen, to examine the current status of
the nation's civil defense program, looking specifically at a potential role for the
U.S. military might be better involved.1 61
A month later, President Kennedy
announced the transfer of the entire civil defense mission from the civilian Office
of Civil Defense Management (OCDM) to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
This occurred despite opposition to the reassignment from the head of OCDM
NSC Actions Nos. 2406-2409, Record of Actions by the National Security Council at its Four
Hundred and Seventy-Eighth Meeting held on April 22, 1961, 24 April 1961. See also National
Security Action Memorandum No. 48, Memorandum to the Secretary of Defense and Director,
OCDM from McGeorge Bundy, 25 April 1961.
161
and the previously expressed views of senior military officers. Civil defense
remained a Pentagon mission until President Carter created the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979, at which time civilian
authorities again took control.
The history of civil defense in the United States since the end of World
War II provides a rich pool of data and a strong set of theoretical tests for
evaluating the peculiar mission-assignment phenomenon. The longevity of the
case is extremely valuable: formalized structures for civil defense from nuclear
attack begin with the Truman Administration and still exist today. This time span
neatly corresponds with the existence of a professional standing army in the
United States. It also allows for significant variation in several of the factors
central to the theories being tested.
First, the elite, public, and military views of the overall threat environment
have varied over the past fifty years. Second, the specific perception of the
importance of civil defense to national security has varied over this time. It is
important to keep in mind that this factor is distinct from views of the overall
threat to the United States, as the nuclear strategy of each administration
significantly affected its view of the particular importance of civil defense. Third,
the public's view of the military has reached perhaps its greatest highs and lows
during the past fifty years. Fourth and most interesting, the civil defense mission
is a unique case of authority moving not only from civilian to military agent, but
from military to civilian agent. Indeed, as Table 2 illustrates, the civil defense
mission moved in each direction twice. As such, one can observe three discrete
tests of each theory within the single case.
In addition, the history of civil
defense includes one instance where some of the theories considered would
predict a transfer to the military, but where no transfer of authority occurred.
Table 2. US Agencies Responsible for Civil Defense, 1949-2009
1948-1949:
Office of Civil Defense (OSD)
1949-1951:
National Security Resources Board
1951-1957:
Federal Civil Defense Agency
1958-1962:
Office of Civil Defense Management
1962-1964:
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Civil Defense
1964-1972:
Office of Civil Defense (Army)
1973-1979:
Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (Defense Agency)
1979-present:
Federal Emergency Management Agency
Phase I: Civilian Leadership (1948-1962)
The concept of civil defense came late to the United States.
Geographically isolated from the world's other great powers, the continental
United States had relatively modest civil defense measures in place during the
two world wars it fought abroad. The American use of atomic weapons in the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the imminent arrival of Soviet
nuclear weapons and delivery capability launched the modern American debate
over civil defense.
Its first important appearance was in the 1946 Strategic
Bombing Survey.
The Survey, which greatly underestimated the effects of
radiation, argued that one could avoid some nuclear weapons damage through
"wise planning." Among its recommendations were the widespread use of bomb
shelters and planning for crisis evacuations.
As a follow-on to the Survey, the General Staff of the War Department
tasked an internal study on where responsibility for civil defense planning and
operations ought to reside.
The resulting study, issued in April 1946,
recommended that the military provide the backbone of federal civil defense
efforts
and
coordinate
other
emergency
management
assistance
to
communities. 16 2 Five months after the release of these recommendations, the
War Department appointed a Civil Defense Board of senior military officers to
study the potential role of the Department in civil defense. Reporting in February
1947, the Board, chaired by Major General Harold Bill, agreed with the Strategic
Bombing Survey and the General Staff study on the importance of civil defense
measures, but it argued that the responsibility for the mission should not be the
War Department's.
"Such problems are civilian in nature," the Bull Report
concluded, "and should be solved by civilian organizations.
163
Thomas J. Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust? (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1983), 19-20.
163 Office of the Secretary of Defense, War Department Civil Defense Board, A Study of Civil
Defense (Washington: War Department Civil Defense Board, 1948), 10.
162
Despite the views of the Civil Defense Board, in March 1948 President
Truman gave the initial responsibility for civil defense planning to the newly
created Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).
This selection appears to
have been at the suggestion of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Forrestal,
in turn, had been persuaded to back the idea by an energetic colonel who had
drafted the earlier General Staff study.1 64 The colonel's motivation is not clear,
but the study he authored two years earlier had stressed the importance of
integrating civil defense into the overall national defense effort. 65 Regardless of
the rationale, Truman did not intend this decision to be the final word on civil
defense organization.
Instead, he tasked the new Director of Civil Defense,
Russell Hopley only to prepare plans for a more permanent civil defense agency.
The subsequently released Hopley Report recommended keeping civil defense
within OSD to ease coordination with other aspects of military security. The
report was produced without consultation from other agencies of the federal
government and without state and local government input.1 66
Whereas the previous studies related to civil defense had been classified,
the Hopley Report was released in unclassified form in November 1948.
It
quickly met strong resistance from groups and individuals objecting to a "garrison
state" concept of military security. On his regular ABC radio broadcast, Walter
Winchell called the Hopley Report's recommendations, "the greatest threat to our
164
165
166
Kerr, 22.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 23.
100
liberties since the British burned the White House in 1814."167 A convenient
counter-vehicle for civil defense recommendations emerged several months later
in the form of the Hoover Commission Task Force on National Security
Organization. That body held that civil defense should be the responsibility of a
civilian organization and recommended its placement in the National Security
Resources Board (NSRB). 168 President Truman happily obliged in March 1949,
assigning the NSRB with the central role in civil defense planning. This move
was in line with the low priority that Truman assigned to civil defense. As one
historian notes:
There is considerable evidence to support the view that the administration
was fearful that a civil defense program, if implemented, would consume a
disproportionate share of available resources and that the transfer of the
function to the NSRB was calculated to slow down the impetus provided
by the Hopley Report and even to bury civil defense as a significant
element of national security.1 69
Truman's attitude toward civil defense began to change as the
international threat environment grew more ominous and corresponding public
interest in civil defense grew. Following the Soviet nuclear explosion on 23
September 1949, a young Senator John Kennedy publicized a letter he wrote to
Truman warning of US vulnerability to Soviet attacks. 170
Elder statesman
Bernard Baruch likewise put public pressure on the Administration for further
Transcript, American Broadcasting Company, Walter Winchell network radio broadcast, 21
November 1948.
168 US Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, Task Force
Report on National Security Organization, Appendix G (Washington: GPO, 1949).
169 Kerr, 24.
170 New York Times, 10 October 1949, 9.
167
101
action on civil defense.171 In the second half of 1950, over 350 articles on civil
defense appeared in The New York Times, none reflecting opposition to the
mission. 172 Truman's response was to introduce the Federal Civil Defense Act of
1950 on 30 November 1950. Congress passed the measure a mere six weeks
later. The cornerstone of the new law was the creation of a Federal Civil
Defense Administration (FCDA) to define national civil defense policy and
provide related technical support and other guidance to state and local
governments. The 1950 Act was an important development in the history of civil
defense, but its effect should not be overstated. Fear of impending conflict with
the Soviet Union soon ebbed, and congressional and executive interest went with
it. In the two years immediately following its authorization of the FCDA,
Congress denied funding for the centerpiece of the new organization, its shelter
construction program, in its entirety.
By the time the Eisenhower Administration arrived in Washington, the
national civil defense program was moribund. If civil defense proponents were
hopeful that the new President would advocate on their behalf, they were sorely
disappointed. In the early Eisenhower years, the FCDA stressed evacuation as
the primary source of civil defense. This less expensive alternative to a shelter
program was the budget-conscious administration's preferred method for
managing civil defense. Then, in December 1956, the director of the FCDA
presented the President with a proposal for an expansive $32 billion fallout
171
172
New York Times, 31 October 1949, 41.
Kerr, 26.
102
shelter program.
Unlike shelter proposals made in the Truman era, which
frequently were technically incompetent and poorly presented, this FCDA
proposal was much more refined (putting aside the merits of the mission) and
incorporated cost-benefit analysis.1 73
Much like his predecessor, though,
Eisenhower was concerned that any significant investment in civil defense would
hamper his economic efforts.
In addition, he was worried that a strong civil
defense program would work against his administration's nuclear strategy of
mutually assured destruction.
Rather than take direct action on FCDA's proposal, Eisenhower used his
usual technique of turning to outside experts for advice. In May 1957, he named
the Gaither Committee to advise FCDA on the future of civil defense.
In
November, the Committee presented its top-secret recommendations to the
President.
It argued that the Administration's emphasis on evacuation was
inadequate for population protection and proposed a $25 billion, six-year,
nationwide shelter program, as well as further studies on blast shelter
effectiveness.1 74 Several months later, the Rockefeller Fund published its own
report on civil defense.
Nelson Rockefeller chaired the Panel while Henry
Kissinger prepared the report.
Like the Gaither Commission, the Rockefeller
Panel recommended improvements to the nation's fallout shelter program.
Interestingly, the Panel also concluded, "the major difficulty with civil defense has
173
174
On Truman era proposals, see Kerr, 46-57. On the 1956 shelter proposal, see Kerr, 105.
David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: OSU
Press, 1999), 118-119.
103
been our failure to treat it as an integral part of our defense planning."1 75 Finally,
in July 1958, the RAND Corporation released a report authored by Herman Kahn
that backed the development of a nationwide fallout shelter program.
76
Not
surprisingly, the FCDA was buoyed by the new emphasis on shelters that these
groups brought.1 77
Despite the support for civil defense from these advisory bodies,
Eisenhower invested little in civil defense during the remainder of his term. His
immediate response to these reports was to combine the FCDA and the Office of
Defense Mobilization into a new civilian Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization
(OCDM). 1 78 He then proposed that OCDM operate a modest National Shelter
Policy through which the federal government would focus on public education
and shelter design concepts, building only 150 prototype shelters and additional
shelters for civilian federal buildings. 179
Even given these scaled-back
objectives, Congress cut the budget for the Office of Civil and Defense
Mobilization by 40% between 1959 and 1961.8
One prominent congressional
opponent of civil defense, Senator Steve Younger of Ohio, remarked that the
federal civil defense organization was "an utterly useless organization with many
175
Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc. , 1961), 140.
76
Kerr, 111-112.
17 7
178
179
180
Snead, 136.
The Federal Register, 23, 1 July 1958, 4991.
Kerr, 113.
Snead, 168-169.
104
thousands of men and women feeding at the public trough, but rendering no
useful service." 81
Eisenhower is the only president to have written at any length about the
civil defense debate in his memoirs.
He states two primary motivations in
rejecting an expansion of civil defense: budget politics and deterrence. First,
Eisenhower stressed that his course was one of moderation aimed at preventing
the creation of a "garrison state."082 Eisenhower applauded the Gaither Report's
"useful distillations of data" and "interesting suggestions" but rejected the product
as a "master blueprint for action."
"The President, unlike a panel which
concentrates on a single problem," he later wrote, "must always strive to see the
totality of the national and international situation. He must take into account
conflicting purposes, responding to legitimate needs but assigning priorities and
keeping plans and costs within bounds." 83
His concern over the budget was nicely complemented by the implications
for civil defense in the Administration's strategic policy. John Foster Dulles
strongly objected to a massive American civil defense program on strategic
grounds. First, he felt that investing so heavily in civilian defense for the United
States when such protection was unaffordable to US allies in Europe would
undermine US-European relations and might undermine deterrence in Europe.
18
Kerr, 114.
Dwight David Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1965), 222.
183 Ibid., 221.
1
105
Second, Dulles felt that a fortress America approach would undermine the
strategy of massive retaliation. As quoted by Eisenhower, Dulles' rationale was,
"it's hard to sustain simultaneously an offensive and defensive mood in a
population. For our security, we have been relying above all on our capacity for
retaliation. From this policy, we should not deviate now."184
During the Eisenhower decade, public and congressional interest in and
support for civil defense remained soft. The Gaither, Rockefeller, and RAND
reports show that some concentrated interest existed for civil defense in the
scientific and defense communities. One strongly pro-civil defense forum was
the Military Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
Headed by California Democrat Chet Holifield, the committee held regular
hearings on civil defense and even questioned military witnesses on the subject.
The hearings of the Holifield Committee therefore shed light on the senior
military's views on civil defense.
The witnesses before the Holifield Committee were generally sympathetic
to the requirement for civil defense, based both on humanitarian and strategic
deterrence grounds. They made clear their strong preference for it to remain a
civilian responsibility, however. General Maxwell Taylor testified in 1958: "I am
not responsible for civil defense, I don't want to be responsible for civil defense"
and such a tasking would "conflict with our primary role of combat."
184
185
185
Curtis
Ibid., 223.
Kerr, 109.
106
LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command, was more uniformly negative
about civil defense. He referred to the Gaither Report's shelter proposal as a
"Maginot Line concept."
Perhaps displaying an organizational bias for the
offensive, LeMay commented, "I don't think I would put that much money [$5
billion per year] into holes in the ground. I would rather spend more of it on
offensive systems to deter war in the first place."186
Phase 11: Military Leadership (1962-1979)
Aside from his letter to President Truman in 1950, John Kennedy had paid
scant attention to civil defense in his political career.
He certainly had not
campaigned on the issue. Once arriving in office, however, he decided to take
some initiative at improving the U.S. civil defense posture. On February 1, 1962,
McGeorge Bundy called Carl Kaysen, then teaching at Harvard, and asked him
to oversee a revitalization of civil defense from the National Security Council
(NSC). 187 Kaysen, who had had some experience in civil defense during World
War II, agreed to come to the NSC when his teaching duties were completed in
May.
In March, Kaysen made a preliminary visit to Washington, meeting with
the President, his Scientific Advisor, Jerome Wiesner, and Army specialists in the
Pentagon.
186
187
By that time, it was understood that the President wished to
Ibid., 109.
Author interview with Carl Kaysen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 6 December 2000.
107
disestablish the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization and shift responsibility
for civil defense to Robert McNamara's Defense Department. In May, Kaysen
presented a proposal for the transfer, which was approved by the President. On
25 May 1961, Kennedy announced his civil defense initiative in his Second State
of the Union message, stressing its importance "as insurance for the civilian
population. . .in the event of a catastrophe." Kennedy stated that if Americans
could accept the fundamental rationality of insurance in an era of potential
miscalculation, then "there is no point in delaying the initiation of a nationwide
long-range program of identifying present fallout shelter capacity and providing
shelter in new and existing structures."
Kennedy went on to announce the
assignment of civil defense to a new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Civil
Defense and the re-roling of OCDM into the titular White House Office of
Emergency Planning. 188
The military seems not to have even weighed in on the debate over civil
defense reassignment. When Kaysen spoke with Army personnel in March, they
seemed to accept the inevitability of the tasking.1 89 There were certainly no
protests from the senior military akin to that which had occurred in the Truman
and Eisenhower eras. The only vocal opponents of the move were the Director
of the Office of Civil Defense Management, Frank Ellis, and Senator Albert
Thomas (R-UT).
The former was a Kennedy appointee from Louisiana who
wielded little power in Washington.
188
Despite putting up resistance, Ellis was
President John F. Kennedy, Urgent National Needs, Address to the United States, 25 May
1961.
189 Author interview with Carl Kaysen.
108
effectively outweighed
by McNamara. 190 As for Senator Thomas, the
Administration simply circumvented a showdown with him by keeping him in the
dark about the move until it was announced to the public. Thomas' own political
power, and the absence of public interest in civil defense by the end of 1961,
would in turn help him circumvent the Administration's plans less than a year
later, when he regained oversight of civil defense appropriations.
Without memoirs, President Kennedy's motives for embracing civil
defense will never be known for certain. There is some evidence in the writings
and recollections of those who worked for him, however, that his interests were
founded in a mix of earnestness and politics. On the former, Kennedy made
clear to Kaysen that he believed it was his responsibility as president to
contemplate and plan for worst-case contingencies. He felt that if civil defense
measures could improve the survival rate of the American population in a nuclear
attack, he should ensure that such measures were enacted, provided they were
neither overly costly nor provocative. 191
At the same time, Kennedy believed that there were domestic political
benefits to improving federal civil defense. In his biography of the President,
Theodore Sorensen states that the potential candidacy of Republican Nelson
Rockefeller in 1964 influenced Kennedy's desire to take on civil defense before
190 Theodore C Sorensen, Kennedy, (New
191 Author interview with Carl Kaysen.
York: Harper and Row, 1965), 614.
109
Rockefeller could make it a campaign issue. 19 2 Carl Kaysen distinctly recalls
3
Kennedy commenting, "Nelson's trying to put it up my back. I'll put it up his."19
As to why Kennedy transferred responsibility for civil defense to the Defense
Department, Sorensen refers only to an interest in "efficiency."094
Kaysen's account goes further, recalling that McNamara thought little of
the OCDM's management and capabilities and suggested that if the President
wanted something done about civil defense, he ought to transfer it under
McNamara's authority.1 95 Also, OCDM budget requests had met stiff resistance
in the Senate Appropriations Committee's Independent Offices Subcommittee. A
transfer to DoD would move the program under the jurisdiction of the Military
Operations Subcommittee.
Despite the focus on domestic, bureaucratic, and personal interests in
these accounts, there were also compelling strategic rationales for a renewed
emphasis on civil defense. First, Kennedy's own strategic doctrine of flexible
response was a distinct move away from the "balance of terror" that
characterized Eisenhower's massive retaliation strategy. Civil defense, as a form
of damage limitation, was entirely compatible with that strategy.
international tensions reached new heights in 1961.
Second,
Although McGeorge
Bundy's call to Kaysen in February indicates the early interest of the
192
193
194
195
Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 614.
Author interview with Carl Kaysen.
Sorenson, 614.
Author interview with Carl Kaysen.
110
Administration in civil defense, it was not until shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco
that a review of the current program was formally raised and tasked in a National
Security Council meeting. Interestingly, it was highlighted as one in a series of
actions aimed at "strengthening the basic U.S. posture toward the communist
world."196 Theodore Sorenson's account of Kennedy's evolving views on civil
defense likewise support its link to the period of "agonizing reappraisal" between
the Bay of Pigs and his Second State of the Union Message.1 97
Further, Kennedy's 25 May speech was given on the eve of his meeting
with Khrushchev to discuss the status of Berlin. The next time he raised the
issue was in his July 25 speech rejecting Khrushchev's ultimatum to reach a
German settlement by the end of the year. At that time, he announced that the
transfer of OCDM's functions to the Defense Department was complete and that
preparations would begin to secure the American population in the event of any
crisis. 198 The next day, Secretary McNamara presented the Administration's
$207 million shelter expansion request to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The program involved the use of military public works centers and the Army
Corps of Engineers to train surveyors and then perform surveys of the existing
stock of fallout shelters. The request passed in its entirety, a first for shelter
proponents. 199
196 Record of Actions by the National Security Council at its Four Hundred and Seventy-Eighth
Meeting held on April 22, 1961.
197
198
Sorenson, 613.
Anthony J.Wiener, Arms Control and Civil Defense, Annex IV: The Domestic Political
Interactions, Hudson Institute, HI-216-RR/IV, 20 August 1963, 5.
199 Kerr, 120-121.
111
Just as quickly as its prospects seemed to rise, civil defense faded from
view once again. Several factors contributed to its decline. There was public
confusion over just what Kennedy's proposed program entailed. For example,
would the government build private shelters or only community shelters (it was
the latter)? There was also predictable outcry by liberal groups who expressed
dismay at the Administration's "provocative" actions.2 00
Finally, there was the
peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. By the end of 1961, the general
furor over civil defense-positive and negative-had receded.
In January 1962, Senate Appropriations Chairman Joe Cannon put civil
defense back under the jurisdiction of the Independent Offices Subcommittee.
This was done to placate subcommittee chairman Sen. Albert Thomas, who
believed that the Administration had tried to end-run him in its move to
Defense. 2 0 1 The Administration's civil defense budget requests were slashed
drastically in Congress over the next two years:
$695 million requested for
FY1963 cut to $113 million and $347 million requested for FY1964 cut to $11.6
million.202 With the writing so clearly on the wall, the new Johnson Administration
disengaged from the civil defense fight.
In 1965, the responsibility for civil
defense was downgraded from an OSD assistant secretary position to a
directorate within the office of the Secretary of the Army and retitled the Office of
Civil Defense. In testimony given before Congress in 1966, Secretary of Defense
200
201
202
See discussion of SANE reactions in Kerr, 122.
New York Times, 2 January 1962, 1.
Snead, 179.
112
McNamara stated, "We have made strenuous efforts in the past to obtain larger
appropriations for civil defense and have been unsuccessful. I think it is wise,
instead of wasting our time continuing to press for something we cannot
accomplish, to spend our resources on other more fruitful areas of activity. "203
The brief flurry of activity in the Kennedy Administration was followed by
fifteen years of inattention to civil defense in the public and national security
realm. In 1963, already in the downswing of interest in the topic, there were 72
articles in the New York Times referencing civil defense. In 1966, the number
was 20, and in 1968, it was 4.04 No presidential biographies or autobiographies
after Eisenhower make reference to civil defense. In addition to congressional
skepticism about the shelter program, which made any civil defense initiatives
dead on arrival in the appropriations realm, there were several strategic factors
that weighed in the neglect of civil defense. First, the strategic nuclear pendulum
swung back from flexible response to mutually assured destruction, as
McNamara's damage limitation argument was gradually abandoned.
Civil
defense only weakened the MAD doctrine by undermining the balance of terror
on which it was premised. Second, the major foreign policy focus of the United
States during this time was the war in Vietnam, not a strategic nuclear exchange
between the United States and the Soviet Union. Civil defense was far less
salient to this kind of threat than it had been in 1961.
203
204
Cited in Kerr, 137.
Ibid., 134.
113
In recognition of the declining relevance of the civil defense mission,
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird abolished the Office of Civil Defense in 1972
and replaced it with a Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) that
consolidated various military civil support functions. Laird stressed the "double
duty" that funding for this organization would provide in terms of support to local
governments for both natural disasters and nuclear events; he also stressed the
civilian character of its activities and organization.2 05 The Ford Administration
subsequently attempted to peel away the peacetime disaster programs from the
Department of Defense, with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld arguing that such
activities were the responsibility of local governments.
The House Armed
Services Committee objected strongly to this decision, however, and DCPA
continued its dual-role mission.206
Phase Ill: Civilian Leadership ...Again (1979-present)
In 1976, the House Armed Services Committee and the Joint Committee
on Defense Production examined the ever-expanding range of civil defense and
disaster assistance provided through agencies of the federal government. The
two urged the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to consider creating an
organization within the Executive Office of the President to coordinate the efforts
of DCPA, the Federal Disaster Assistance Agency, located in the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, and the President's Office of Emergency
Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, "Civil Preparedness-A New Dual Mission," Defense
Civil Preparedness Annual Report, 1972 (Washington, GPO: 1973), 2.
206 Kerr,
147.
205
114
Planning. In August 1977, President Carter tasked OMB with just such a study,
which culminated in the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency
at the beginning of 1979.
In the ten months of deliberations over FEMA's
creation, a major source of debate was what role the military should retain in civil
defense.20 7 The reorganization plan that Carter ultimately approved called for the
Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council to provide oversight of
FEMA's nuclear attack readiness programs.
The early Reagan years saw an increased interest in a substantial civil
defense program second only to that sought by the Kennedy Administration.
Several factors contributed to the growth of support for civil defense in this
period. First, the Nixon strategy of detente came under attack from the right,
notably from Ronald Reagan himself in the 1976 presidential election. Second,
intelligence sources began to point to a significant Soviet civil defense buildupspending perhaps ten times what the United States did-and a superior Soviet
population protection capability (although the actual effectiveness of these
defenses was questionable).208 Finally, the prevailing winds of nuclear strategy
once again began to favor a flexible response variant. As early as 1973, rightleaning strategists began to talk about the immorality of the MAD strategy and
the need to be capable of winning a nuclear exchange.209
Ibid., 147-148.
Ibid., 152-153.
209 Fred Charles 11I, "Can Nuclear Deterrence Outlast the Century?" Foreign Affairs 51, January
1973, 267-285.
207
208
115
When he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan immediately
looked to expand the US civil defense program. FEMA's first budget request in
the new administration was for $4.3 billion over seven years. It wished to jump
start a fallout shelter program and provide for the mass evacuation of cities on
warning. OMB head David Stockman objected strenuously to the request; he
believed that not only was the program unfeasible, it was also likely to cost over
$10 billion if implemented.
Reagan, "the principal sponsor within the
administration for expanded civil defense," sided with FEMA. 21 0 True to form,
however, Congress cut $100 million from the initial FY1983 request of $254
million.211 As in the 1960s, this set the tone for future executive-congressional
interactions on civil defense. By 1987, the Reagan Administration had softened
its civil defense rhetoric and programs. Its final national security directive on the
topic tasked FEMA to concentrate on natural disasters and completely eliminated
the multibillion-dollar shelter program.
In language similar to that used
throughout the post-war history of American
civil defense, NSDD 259
emphasized the primary responsibility of state and local actors in improving
national capabilities.m
The fullest articulation of President Reagan's idealized civil defense policy
was given in the unclassified 1982 National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 47. NSC staff aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and FEMA officials drafted
210
Christopher Simpson, National Security Directives of the Reagan and Bush Administrations
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 57.
1 Congressional Quarterly, Inc., US Defense Policy, 3 Edition (Washington: CQ Inc., 1983), 67.
212 National Security Decision Directive 259, "US Civil Defense," 4 February 1987.
116
the directive. Intended as an unclassified call to action for civil defense, NSDD47 tasked a wide range of federal actors, including the Defense Department, with
civil defense missions, aiming for full mobilization capability by 1986.
North's
assignment to the civil defense/emergency preparedness account at the NSC,
and his subsequent pairing with FEMA in several ventures, became the source of
great speculation and suspicion.
In 1984, North forwarded a draft executive
order for imposing martial law during crises to the National Security Advisor, then
Bud McFarlane. The proposed order would have given FEMA the authority to
appoint military commanders and run state and local governments.
FEMA
Director Louis Guiffrida, a former National Guardsman who had worked on a
similar plan for Reagan in California, spearheaded the planning effort. Attorney
General William French Smith doubted the legality of the FEMA plan and
persuaded McFarlane to turn it off before the president could approve it.
Although the military does not seem to have been directly considered for the civil
defense task in the Reagan Administration, FEMA's leadership, together with the
key staff aide in the NSC, clearly intended to use the military to manage any kind
of attack- or other crisis-generated response.
As the above historical summary delineates, primary responsibility for
American civil defense has moved seven times since the end of World War II
National Security Decision Directive 47, 22 July 1982.
This account draws from Bill Bradlee, Jr., Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North
(New York: Donald L. Fine, Inc., 1988), 132-136. It is also the subject of numerous independent
Internet sites and discussion threads, many of which maintain that FEMA operates a shadow
government capable of subverting the democratic process in a crisis.
213
214
117
(see Appendix 1).
Three of these instances involved the transition between
military and civilian responsibility. These were:
" Truman's decision to move civil defense from the Pentagon to the National
Security Resources Board (March 1949);
* Kennedy's decision to move civil defense from the Office of Civil and
Defense Mobilization to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (May
1961); and
* Carter's decision to dissolve the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency and
move civil support to the new Federal Emergency Disaster Agency.
In addition to these three cases, there occurred under the Reagan Administration
a possible missed transition period in which presidential support for civil defense
was strong but no organizational change took place.
Excluded from the data set is the initial post-war decision, taken by
Its
President Truman, to create an Office of Civilian Defense within DoD.
exclusion is due to the fact that Truman never assigned operational responsibility
for civil defense to the Department of Defense. 1
Using the same rationale,
Truman's subsequent decision to assign operational responsibility to a civilian
agency is included.
One can assume in this case that Truman's motives were purely rational. Expertise for civil
defense resided in the military at the time, and given Truman's minimal interest in civil defense
and his Secretary of Defense's support of the assignment, this seems a minimal cost planning
solution.
215
118
6. RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS AND PREDICTIONS
Since before the standing force's inception at the end of World War II,the
military has been called on to fight fires, provide relief from natural disasters,
contain riots, enforce desegregation, manage civil defense programs, and
participate in counternarcotics operations. At the same time, the United States
has not given itself over to military dominance in all aspects of national security.
The nation's leaders have sometimes demonstrated a clear preference for
civilian agents over military alternatives. The cases described in this work probe
a range of factors that may be affecting agent selection for national security
missions. This chapter will assess the evidence associated with each such
factor, concluding that three factors appear particularly salient for agent
selection. The nature of the geostrategic environment in which the decision is
made appears as a factor in every case studied. Societal views about military
and civilian governmental efficacy at the time and politicians' interests in
demonstrating their intent to "solve" the national security problem are also
prevalent factors. Importantly, the research described herein does not strongly
support a bureaucratic politics explanation for agent selection. This conclusion is
surprising as this model is one of the most common applied to national security
decision making.
Inchapter 2, I hypothesized that cases of military versus civilian agent
selection for national security could be understood as a simplified two-by-two
119
interaction between decision makers and potential agents. Figures 3 and 4,
below, populate these theoretical interactions with the case studies assessed in
the intervening chapters.
Figure 3
US Military
No Assignment
Assignment Demand
Demand
Win
Win
Administration of
Domestic WMD
consequence management
Germany?
Counternarcotics detection
and monitoring
Civil defense, 1962-1979
Win
Win
Z
Win
Win
Win
Win
Win
Win
Figure 3, describing military agent selection, is interesting for the absence
of maximizing outcomes. That is, none of the cases explored here illustrates a
clear "win-win" solution for political leaders and the military. In three of the
cases, counternarcotics monitoring, domestic WM D consequence management,
and leadership on civil defense, the Department of Defense has demonstrated a
lack of interest in the mission over time. Although some segments of DoD had
interest in these missions, particularly as these subcomponents were
institutionalized, the Department's leadership showed, at best, grudging or very
short-lived leadership.
120
The case of military governance proves to be its own curiosity. In chapter
1, I hypothesized that civilian control of the military would prevent the
appearance of military mission assignment where civilian leadership did not
support it. Although the case set bears this assumption out, the military
governance mission demonstrates the extent to which civilian leaders will bend
their opposition when faced with no alternatives.
Figure 4
US Civilian Agency
No Assignment
Assignment Demand
Demand
Win
Win
r
-
NASA establishment
Foreign police training,
except as noted below
Civil defense, 1947-1962
Win
Win
Win
Win
I
-4
police training,
1974-1980s
.Foreign
Civil defense, 1980-
present
Win
Win
Figure 4 is populated with the various civilian mission assignment cases
explored in this study. These results are quite different than those for the military
assignment cases. They are in fact more in keeping with the expectations set
out in chapter 2 and the political science and public administration literature
explored therein: where agencies vie for a mission and leaders believe them
best suited, the mission is indeed assigned. Where non-military government
agencies have an institutional interest in maintaining the mission, but political
121
leaders are either apathetic or even hostile, the mission withers without strong
mandate or funding.
Civilian control of foreign policing from 2001 to present is an outlier in this
logic. The military, civilians, and decision makers all appear to want civilians to
be assigned this mission in the long-run. Nevertheless, in times of crisis, such as
during some operations in the 1990s and in Iraq and Afghanistan, the need to
complete the mission successfully and the lack of viable alternatives lends an air
of resignation to substantial reliance on the military. Though mission assignment
may not formally change hands, the Defense Department has often times
exerted on-the-ground command in these cases.
To explain these results, I assessed the evidence relating to six factors
that might affect mission assignment. These were: the geostrategic
environment; society's relative views of military and non-military government
agencies; electoral considerations; the compatibility of a mission with agent's
design or ethos; views about the fiscal implications of selecting a particular
agent; and inter- and intra-agency bureaucratic politics. This section will explore
the case evidence as it relates to each of these factors in greater detail.
Strategic Environment
The strategic environment appears to have played a key role in all of the
national security mission assignment case studies. In each case of military
122
mission assignment, civilian leaders voiced their support and seemed to
genuinely believe that such a choice was justified by the international
environment, although sometimes because of the environment's permissiveness
and sometimes because of its stresses. Similarly, the choice of civilian agents
occurred in the context of important geostrategic debates that civilian agency
resolved. Ironically, however, it was sometimes the weakness of civilian
solutions, rather than their relative strength, that served the strategic end.
All three civil defense eras exemplify dominant strategic considerations in
mission assignment. The evidence shows that President Truman had very little
interest in civil defense, and Congress was likewise largely apathetic. Although
concern about the strategic environment was great, the Truman Administration
was not worried about an immediate Soviet capability for devastating atomic
attacks.2 16
Accordingly, it did not consider the civil defense mission to be
important to national security. "Throughout the Truman years," notes a civil
defense expert, "civil defense was regarded as a civilian responsibility distant
from the concerns of strategists."217 Similarly, Eisenhower tied his disinterest in
civil defense at least in part to its incompatibility with his administration's doctrine
of massive retaliation.
Like Truman, Eisenhower sought to buy off political
pressure with a low-budget, low-profile civilian civil defense organization.
216
This came later, as a result of NSC-48. Even then, the Soviets were not projected to have a
single delivery platform capable of reaching the United States until 1954. See Samuel F. Wells,
Jr., "Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security 4 (Spring 1979):
152-154.
217 Lawrence J. Vale, The Limit of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet
Union (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 60.
123
President Kennedy clearly took a personal interest in civil defense and
appeared to genuinely believe in the importance of the mission. This approach fit
with his nuclear strategy of flexible response. It also demonstrated necessary
resolve on the eve of a meeting with Khrushchev. In choosing to transfer the civil
defense mission to DoD, the evidence shows that President Kennedy believed
the program would improve and even expand there. The military of 1961 had
plenty of missions to occupy it. The assignment of civil defense was thus not
made in an effort to refocus or exploit an underused military. Rather, it appears
to reflect a correlation of the mission with a "war" posture and a desire to signal
to the Soviets that the protection of the American public was a key component of
the US nuclear deterrent.
The final 1979 transfer of civil defense to FEMA likewise seems to have
had strategic roots. With the absorption of civil defense into the newly created
FEMA, President Carter seemed to be reflecting a general strategic viewpoint
that civil defense was not a critical capability. Although the public mood about
the strategic environment was beginning to darken, there was no strong interest
in the public, among politicians, or even among nuclear theorists to revitalize civil
defense under civilian or military leadership.
The cases of military mission assignment explored in Chapter 4 likewise
demonstrate the importance of geostrategic considerations. The de facto
124
assignment of military governance in Germany came at a time of high perceived
threat and no strong alternatives. With the nation at war, the environment
seemed to push President Roosevelt to choice a military solution despite his view
that the mission was most appropriate for civilian agencies. Like Kennedy on
civil defense, he appears to have been motivated by the stresses of the
environment rather than its relative calm, as Huntington's transmutation theory
might suggest.
The strategic environment also appears to have played a significant role in
selecting the military for counternarcotics during the late 1980s and domestic
train-the-trainers programs in the mid-1 990s, although for very different reasons.
Inthe immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the relative dearth of conventional
military challenges seems to have created an appetite among political leaders to
expand the uses of the military into new areas. This factor aligns with
Huntington's theory of military transmutation. The use of the military in
counternarcotics had actually been rising throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but
its leadership in aerial and maritime narcotics detection and monitoring arrived
only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Inthe case of domestic consequence
management, the view of US territory as a new battlefront following the first
bombing of the World Trade Center and the Murrah Building, and the relative
availability of military forces no longer on a Cold War posture, seems to have
significantly contributed to congressional leaders' interest in shifting military
resources into homeland security.
125
Geopolitical considerations do not always weigh in favor of military
mission assignment. A strong geopolitical sense was also behind the decision to
civilianize the new US space agency. Foremost in President Eisenhower's mind
in establishing NASA was the need to signal the peaceful nature of the US space
program. He needed a means to pursue an "open skies" policy, which military
mission assignment would have undermined.
Nested within the case set are two instances in which a geostrategiccentered theory of national security mission assignment would seem to predict a
shift from civilian to military agency, but where this change did not formally take
place. The first was civil defense in the early 1980s. President Reagan was
himself a strong proponent of civil defense. Throughout his presidency, public
and elite concern over the Soviet nuclear threat was high.
Moreover, the
administration's nuclear warfighting doctrine called for significant improvements
in civil defense. Although FEMA militarized the US approach in this period,
however, the military was not given control over civil defense.
The second case in which strategic considerations might predict military
assignment is US training of foreign police in Iraq and Afghanistan. This case
bears many similarities to the conditions surrounding military governance in
Germany. In both cases, the nation was at war, and winning the peace was and
is seen as critical to the nation's long-term national security. As with military
126
governance, the geostrategic environment seems to have pushed foreign police
training, otherwise viewed as appropriate to civilians, into the military category.
Yet today, no discussion of formal transfer exists. This case and the civil
defense case in the 1980s suggest the likely presence of other factors at work in
these (non) mission assignments.
Nature of American Society
The extent to which the American public and its leaders subscribe to a
limited role for the military, or for government more generally, also appears to
correlate with the circumstances surrounding assignment of national security
missions in several of the case studies. The liberalism of American society that
Samuel Huntington described does indeed appear to have abated over time.
The early cases of mission assignment explored inthis work are filled with
examples of civilian leaders hesitating in their use of the military for new
missions. The issue unfolded, after all, during a period of relative harmony
between civilian and military institutions. "Civilian institutions were preeminently
liberal in character," writes Huntington of the era, "but no necessary conflict
existed between them and the professional military institutions, so long as each
was kept within its proper sphere."218 The case work seems to demonstrate,
however, that by the 1980s, such circumspection had largely given way to an
acceptance of a powerful and capable military instrument in the form of standing
armed forces.
218
Huntington, 457.
127
President Roosevelt's reluctance to use the military for the governance of
Germany is the case set's first encounter with circumspection about its role in
society and in national security. Together with Harold Ickes and other key
leaders, Roosevelt was convinced that the military should not expand into the
civilian governance domain and capitulates only when no alternative appears
feasible. Similarly, President Eisenhower, his science advisors, and thenSenator Lyndon Johnson all worked from a premise of limiting the military face of
space science. Eisenhower's reasoning was likely grounded in more than a
general deference to traditional liberalism. Rather, as the discussion of strategic
factors indicates, the president's primary desire appears to have been convincing
the international community that America's motives were peaceful in nature,
when in reality they had tremendous military application.
The 1963 assignment of foreign police training to the newly created US
Agency for International Development was another case in which Huntington's
description of traditional liberalism appears to be at work. Despite interest from
the Defense Department in coordinating foreign police training for the US
government, its civilian counterparts were wary of granting it this role. They were
concerned that the military would not train police so much as create new
paramilitary forces abroad.
128
By the late 1970s, society's view of the military was at a distinct
crossroads. The Vietnam experience still cast a pall over Americans' view of the
military (it would until the Grenada invasion several years later), but a backlash to
the anti-military view was beginning to take root. There is little evidence,
however, the President Carter was concerned about the civil-military implications
of reassigning civil defense to FEMA. He and congressional decision-makers
instead focused on more instrumental reasons for favoring civilian agency, which
are explored further below.
There was a curious exception in the case set to the otherwise clear
preference of early Cold War decision makers for a limited military role in society.
At the very time civilians were expressing concern over the possibility of military
leadership in foreign police training, President Kennedy was assigning civil
defense to McNamara's Defense Department. Given their contemporaneous
nature, the strategic environment and views on the role of the military in society
are unsatisfactory in explaining why the military should be preferred for one
mission and civilians for the other. Other factors relating to the agencies and
missions themselves may help explain these differences.
By the late 1980s, the United States had conducted a successful invasion
of Grenada and was facing down the Soviet Union in Central America and
around the world. Traditional liberalism, as Huntington described it in 1957,
appears to have declined markedly from the 1980s to today. In that period,
129
decision makers have called on the military in the War on Drugs, assigned it to
lead the domestic train-the-trainers program and develop civil support teams, and
relied on it in large part for foreign police training in Latin America and again in
Iraq and Afghanistan. As the case evidence shows, the majority of the public
and its elected leaders have generally been comfortable with the military taking
on these new tasks during the past thirty years.
There have been objections voiced in all of these cases, of course. A
consistently vociferous advocate of limiting the military's role in these new
national security missions is the Defense Department's own leadership, civilian
and military. They are sometimes odd bedfellows with civil libertarians,
development and diplomacy professionals, and the law enforcement community,
all of whom seek clearer domestic/foreign and civil/military lines of authority. In
the cases reviewed here, however, this opposition pales in comparison to the
overwhelming acceptance of an expanding military role in foreign and national
security policy.
Electoral Value
Public views of an agency's effectiveness correlated with agent selection
throughout the case set, suggesting that public opinion and electoral
considerations are often important. This may at first strike the reader as obvious:
who would not select a winning horse when wagering at the track? At times,
however, the public perception of agent effectiveness ran counter to informed
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opinions provided to decision-makers about where key expertise resided or
should reside. This was true for two of the three cases where missions were
assigned to the military: counternarcotics detection and monitoring and domestic
consequence management.
The military's assignment as the nation's lead for aerial and maritime
narcotics detection and monitoring was a clear and direct result of public
pressure. The public was deeply concerned about drug use and trafficking as a
national security issue, and they wanted the military involved in stopping it. This
pressure does not seem to have resulted from a generally held belief that the
military would be more effective than law enforcement agencies, but that the
addition of the military to the war on drugs would improve the nation's overall
chances for success. The public's trust in the military and its desire to throw all
tools at the problem gave US politicians more than sufficient justification to
expand the military's role despite expert advice that doing so would not
demonstrably improve national counternarcotics efforts.
As in the counternarcotics case, public leaders, particularly in Congress,
sought to assign the domestic WMD train-the-trainers program to the Department
of Defense and to establish the National Guard Civil Support Teams with DoD
funds despite good evidence that these were not likely to be the most effective
solutions. Nevertheless, public pressure to make the United States safer from
possible terrorist attacks was intense, and America's post-Gulf War military was
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viewed as trustworthy and competent. That sense of military effectiveness was
critical to the mission assignment choice.
The third case of military agent selection studied here, that of military
governance of Germany, provided insufficient evidence to make judgments
regarding public perceptions of the relative capabilities of civilian and military
agencies. Elite perceptions that civilian agencies would be unlikely to succeed,
however, were critical to the dynamics of agent selection. Once again, this case
has similarities with foreign police training today. Although in the latter case
official leadership has been retained on the civilian side, the limitations of civilian
capacity have significantly contributed to an expert view, even if grudging, that
the military is the only effective choice.
The civil defense cases provide mixed insights on the importance that
perceptions of agencies' effectiveness played in their selection. Truman and
Eisenhower appear to have chosen civilian civil defense solutions for their very
likelihood of long-term failure. Particularly in the case of Eisenhower, grander
geostrategic rationales took precedence over public perceptions of agency
effectiveness for the mission. Both presidents felt some public pr3essure to act,
but their goal appears to have been satiating public demand for action with the
least investment of time and resources.
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The 1962 transfer of responsibility from the Office of Civil and Defense
Mobilization to the Department of Defense signaled President Kennedy's desire
to step up civil defense programs. Kennedy was at least in part motivated by
domestic political considerations. His fear of Nelson Rockefeller's ability to turn
civil defense into an election issue obviously weighed somewhat in the overall
decision to increase that program's profile.
He clearly supported the
recommendations of the Gaither Commission and others who argued for a closer
alignment of civil defense and military planning. And under McNamara, he
believed, the Defense Department would get the civil defense job done better
than its civilian predecessor.
In the remainder of cases, there do not appear to be significant electoral
dynamics at work. Rather, there is strong correlation between elites' views of
agency effectiveness and agent selection. The creation of NASA as a civilian
agency, for example, was viewed as the efficacious choice by both President
Eisenhower and Senator Johnson, who shepherded the White House's
legislation to success. Public opinion seems to have played a minor role in agent
selection. Indeed, Senator Johnson moved off of the topic quickly after public
interest cooled.
The transfer of civil defense to FEMA also appears mostly to be the result
of an earnest recasting of the mission as one of natural disaster preparedness.
In 1978, the key issue seems to have been how best to provide a coherent
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federal response to domestic emergency assistance. As a former governor,
Carter was particularly sensitive to the plea from the states for better
coordination. President Carter's decision centered around his view that a civilian
agency would better support state and local response.
The assignment of foreign police training to US AID is a third case where
electoral politics appear to have played a minor role and a reasoned assessment
of relative agency effectiveness dominated. There were no arguments made to
shift the mission formally to the military at any point thereafter. Each time there
were peaks of civilian decision-maker interest in improving US foreign police
training capacity and capability, decision-makers in the Executive and Legislative
Branches concluded that growing civilian, rather than military capacity, would be
most effective. Although this is true even today, the exigencies of combat
environments in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the apparent lack of public
and political interest in expanding the development and diplomatic corps, has
limited the growth of such capacity.
Agency Design and Budgetary Consequences
Agency design and budgetary capacity are closely related to one another.
Agencies like the Defense Department that are built to surge in emergencies are
able to absorb emerging missions more easily, with the funding mechanisms,
budget largess, and congressional support to absorb such mission "shocks."
Conversely, peacetime civilian organizations, such as the Department of State
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and even domestic law enforcement agencies, are sized to execute their routine
missions and not to train and prepare for future contingencies. As the case set
demonstrates, these factors can favor military mission assignment even when
the mission appears better suited to the expertise of another agency.
The size of the military, its tremendous expeditionary and logistical
capability, and its ability to develop schoolhouses and training regimes on
relatively short notice were all key factors in its successful bid to oversee the
governance of occupied Germany. Despite Roosevelt's strong preference for
civilian leadership, Department of State and other agencies could not
demonstrate their ability to succeed at the mission. In fact, they had already
shown their limitations during the North Africa campaign. Likewise, each time
surge capacity became an issue in civilian leadership of foreign police training,
the military stepped into the mission in at least a supporting role. These
instances have also generally involved non-permissive or semi-permissive
operating environments in which force protection is critical to completing the
mission. US civilian agencies lack the ability to protect themselves, making their
assignment in conflict zones at times more burdensome to the military than
simply executing the needed tasks itself.
The military's role in counternarcotics is another case where significant
budgetary support, extant technology, and expeditionary capacity were critical to
its involvement. The military owned planes, radars, submarines, and coastal
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patrol craft to undertake the monitoring and detection role. There were clear
resource efficiencies to be gained by having these tools in the counterdrug
arsenal rather than building a second, comparable law enforcement "army." The
WMD Civil Support Teams likewise brought seeming resource efficiency by
repurposing National Guard members and their equipment. In both the
counternarcotics and WMD cases, DoD was excluded from Gramm-RudmanHollins balanced budget ceilings, easing constraints on funding these new
missions.
For two of the cases in which civilian agencies were selected for national
security missions, agency design and budget authority were built into the
decision. Both NASA and FEMA were designed at the time they were absorbing
space exploration and space science and civil defense, respectively. The
assignment of foreign police training first to USAID and later to the Department of
Justice was accompanied by the creation of new subcomponents intended to
provide them greater flexibility than their parent institution and to protect them
from the rest of their organizations. These cases thus may support the general
rule of military preference rather than contravene it. If a civilian agent is to be
selected, it appears decision-makers will need to create mechanisms to
overcome the limitations of agency design and resource constraints that normally
apply.
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Inter- and Intra-agency Politics
One of the most surprising insights from the case set examined in this
work is the limited number in which strong push and pull agency and political
pressures appear to drive agency choice. Several cases involved significant
lobbying on the part of some agencies or subcomponents thereof, but only in half
of the cases did these pressures appear to weigh in the decision. These were
the case of the WMD Civil Support Teams, military governance in Germany,
Truman's assignment of civil defense to the National Security Resources Board,
and the establishment of NASA. With the exception of the WMD CSTs, there is
little evidence that bureaucratic politics was pivotal.
The National Guard Bureau is a powerful organization in American
politics. With members drawn from all states, many of whom are in prominent
local positions, and responsibility to the governors, the Guard is often able to
outmaneuver the military services, particularly the Army, on Capitol Hill. When
the Guard conceived of the WMD CSTs, it had a born winner. There was
opposition to funding the CSTs from inside the Department, and strong testimony
from local first responders that the CSTs were unlikely to provide the return on
the federal taxpayer dollar that they could. Yet the National Guard convinced
Congress that the CSTs could provide distributive politics at their best, sending a
22-person gift to every US senator.
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The military governance case provides the next strongest evidence for the
role of inter-agency politics. The Army sought the military governance mission
and attempted to sway its interagency counterparts and President Roosevelt
throughout the decision-making process. What is most fascinating about this
case is the extent to which the military appears to have failed in making its case,
yet succeeded in obtaining the mission. Roosevelt was never persuaded that the
military was the right choice for the assignment of running a country just
emerging from fascist rule. He agreed with key civilian advisors that the military
might be too anti-Democratic and lacking in intellectual heft to succeed at the
task. Infact, if not for the abject failure of civilian agencies to present a viable
alternative, civilian governance would have indeed resulted from the mission
assignment deliberations. The military was advantaged by being on the ground
in Germany and executing capably, creating a fait accompli that Roosevelt chose
not to overturn.
In reassigning civil defense from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to
the National Security Resources Board, President Truman appeared to have
been won over by the bureaucratic success of pro-civilian assignment forces.
They included senior members of the military, as expressed in the Bull Report,
media commentators, such as Walter Winchell, and the Hoover Commission.
Against these strong forces were arrayed the lesser power of Russell Hopley, the
Director of Civil Defense, and possibly Secretary of Defense Forrestal, although
there is no evidence from Forrestal of his position on the move. It is important to
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recall, however, that the movement to place civil defense in the hands of civilians
was rooted in a principled argument about traditional liberalism.
Civilian
government agencies do not appear to have weighed in on the debate.,
The creation of a civilian NASA could be seen as a textbook case of
bureaucratic politics in action. Elements within the military sought the mission,
though the Secretary of Defense ultimately did not pursue it. Civilian science
advisors rallied around the government's scientific community to lobby for a nonmilitary agency, garnering agreement for their position from the president and the
chief congressional space advocate. Unfortunately, the evidence from
Eisenhower's own writings and that of contemporary historians point to
geostrategic rationales that weighed most heavily in Eisenhower's mind. It is
likely that even if he had been inclined to support those within the Defense
Department who sought the space lead, he would have nevertheless chosen a
civilian agency to protect his search for early warning through peaceful, open
skies.
None of the other cases contains sufficient evidence that bureaucratic
politics played a critical role in mission assignment. There were almost certainly
some special operations forces who embraced the counternarcotics role. Their
influence may have been more significant than normal as Congress had just
recently established the US Special Operations Command and may have been
looking for missions to fulfill its mandate. There is very little in the way of
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congressional testimony, opinion pieces, or first-hand accounts that substantiate
this supposition, however. In the remaining cases of civil defense and foreign
police training, there appears to have been very modest outside interest or
lobbying on the part of any agency for the mission. Indeed, in the 1961
assignment of foreign police training to US AID, the only agency that lobbied for
the mission-the Defense Department-was bested by an agency whose head
actively sought to avoid it.
Through a careful sifting of the causation for mission assignment in these
eight cases, a clear pattern is evident. The nature of the strategic environment,
the way in which society and its elected officials view the effectiveness of
potential agents, and the agencies' own design features are, together, reliable
indicators of agency selection for contested national security missions. I
conclude this work by proposing these factors as a theory of national security
mission assignment. I also provide some further areas of inquiry for future
scholars interested in the agency selection decision phenomenon and some
observations on its importance to national security policy making.
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CONCLUSION
The degree to which civilian decision-makers are seized with the
importance of a national security mission and the implications they ascribe to
military or civilian institutionalization of that role are paramount considerations in
determining how agencies are selected to lead in new threat areas. Since the
end of the Second World War, the United States Government has made a
conscious choice between civilian and military agents over one dozen times.
Those choices all reflect some attention to the geopolitical effects of military or
civilian agency.
Geopolitical effects in agent selection are themselves caused by another,
often unattributed factor, however. As the evidence presented in this work
demonstrates, an agency's effectiveness-or, alternatively, foreign and domestic
public perceptions of its effectiveness-are critical in determining what strategic
signal is being sent by its assignment to a new mission. When a strong signal is
desired, as is typically the case, an agency perceived as effective and
strategically appropriate is assigned the mission. When a weak signal is
preferred, which occurred early in the evolution of US civil defense policy and in
foreign police training after 1974, the agent is often weak in resources and
power.
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Since at least the mid-1 980s, these factors have favored a growth in
mission assignment to the US military. With the abatement of traditional
liberalism and the demonstrated strength of America's all-volunteer force, the
public has come to view the military as the most trusted institution in the nation.
Over the same period of time, as Peri Arnold describes, media, politicians, and
the public have increasingly branded the US government and its civilian workers
as ineffectual bureaucrats. For many politicians today, the strongest alternative
to giving a mission to the military may not be a civilian agency at all, but rather a
non-governmental contractor.
This outcome is consistent with David Mayhew's theory that political
leaders often seek symbolic value for their policy choices. Although Mayhew
was predicting behavior for members of Congress, the increasing encroachment
of electoral politics into administrative realignments of the Executive Branch may
argue for its applicability to the president as well. The evidence presented in this
study seems to corroborate such a view of the presidency. From Eisenhower's
desire to signal symbols of peace to George H.W. Bush's intent to appease
public concern in the "war on drugs" through an expansion of military
counternarcotics roles, presidents have consistently used national security
agency selection for symbolic power. This is not to argue that the choices are
necessarily irrational or made for purely instrumental reasons. Rather, I contend
that the desire to convey a strategic message is foremost in the decision-makers
mind when an issue is particularly pressing in international or national politics.
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The cases presented in this study are suggestive of this theory, but they
by no means confirm it. To determine whether there is independent explanatory
power to a symbolism variable, several additional factors should be explored.
The interplay of party politics was only touched on in this study and may be a
factor in national security agency selection. Mission assignment to the military
occurred under both Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses, as
did civilian mission assignment. Nevertheless, there may be factors relating to
unified or divided government not investigated here that shed light on why
agency selection occurs or, even more probable, when it occurs.
Similarly,
exploring whether the causes of national security mission assignment are
affected by who initiates the assignment-members of congress or the
president-may generate interesting data. A more extensive review of polling
data relating to foreign domestic views on particular missions is another fruitful
area of inquiry. It may help to substantiate or refute a symbolic power theory.
The research presented here should be of great interest to policy makers
as well as scholars. The most important policy insight provided by the case data
is that there are significant consequences to using the military as a symbolic
instrument in the national security realm. Doing so raises the potential for
serious aberrations of American liberal tradition, in which the military's role is
circumscribed and clearly subordinated to civilian control. It may also risk
success in mission execution, where the military does not have the ethos or
expertise to perform the mission. Moreover, a general trend of military reliance
will undermine civilian national security institutions, chipping away at their already
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lessened resources and mandate. Finally, it could degrade DoD's ability to
function effectively.
The national security realm is ever changing, and our institutions must
adapt with it. From climate change and pandemic diseases to the possible theft
and use of a nuclear device by terrorists, the range of potential threats is vast.
The next major crisis may be just around the corner. Will the nation respond by
assigning or shifting missions to civilian or military agents? This body of
research suggests that even if civilians are assigned mission responsibility,
absent significant and sustained investment in civilian agencies' authorities,
resources, and capacities, or a major operational failure by the US military, the
American public and its leaders will continue to regard the military as its "agent of
last resort." Over the long-term, this dynamic risks a self-fulfilling prophecy in
which US military competence increases while civilian institution building
declines.
Righting this dangerous trend will require the nation to build strong civilian
national security capabilities. In most cases, future challenges will require
integrated, multi-disciplinary solutions that extend well beyond the expertise of
any single US Government department or agency. Advancing US security in this
environment will require a strong set of national security tools, military and
civilian, with each providing a unique contribution in support of US interests.
Improving civilian capabilities for missions so clearly within their purview is a
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better long-term investment for the nation, the bureaucracy, and the military, than
continuing to preference military solutions.
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